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Have You Heard of Prolog?
A quick review of this poorly known programming language and why it could potentially shape your career
Prolog is one of those languages you normally learn during your formative years (in school, university, and the like), but it is learned and forgotten almost at the same time.
Why is that, though? Well, personally, I blame our industry. I’ve been working as part of the software development industry for the past 17 years, and during that time, I’ve worked on all kinds of web development and big-data-related projects (i.e. big platforms, ETL pipelines, and everything in between). The reality is that I never saw a single line of Prolog anywhere.
Fast-forward to last week. It’s a regular Tuesday and I’m interviewing an aspiring software developer. When asked what other languages they knew how to use, they dropped the line “Well, I learned Prolog during my university years, but no one uses that anymore.”
This got me thinking, “How accurate is that?”
Surely, that can’t be true, can it? Full disclaimer: I am not one of those software developers who learned Prolog during university. I never saw it as part of my curricula, but I did learn about it several years ago while reading Seven Languages in Seven Weeks (a must-read book for all developers by the way). Prolog is one of the languages covered and it definitely shows the potential it has. So, I’ll ask again: Why is it not used anymore?
Given the number of different programming languages or frameworks that spring every week in different communities, one would assume our ecosystem is quite dynamic and ever-changing. However, that is not entirely true. In fact, if you really think about it, there is not a lot of variation. There is a lot of procedural programming, some declarative programming, quite a lot of object-oriented programming, and recently (and by “recently,” I mean in the last few years) functional programming. There are other paradigms, but according to StackOverflow’s 2020 Developer Survey, the top ten most popular programming languages are:
