5 ms·
The Mercury logic programming system
- ElectroSlayer 4mo agoOh wow, Zoltan was one of my lecturers at UniMelb, and in one semester we were tasked with learning his Mercury language. So good to see it thriving still.
- zeafoamrun 4mo agoI TA-ed for Zoltan's 2nd year "learning how to use bash/gdb/etc" class and it was a lot of fun. I hope they're still teaching that class.
- angry_octet 4mo agoIt was called "433-252 Software Engineering Principles & Tools" until ~2008 I think (433-244 before that) but then it seems to have been reorganised. Tbh, Unimelb Comp Sci is a shadow of it's former self, a victim of the 'Melbourne Model' common core sausage factory concept.
- ofrzeta 4mo agoIs it the same model as the "Bologna process" in Europe, which is kind of funny because "Bologna" also refers to a type of sausage in the US of A.
- angry_octet 4mo agoI hope he's stopped drinking Fanta.
- thechao 4mo agoThe closest that I could find to a "what the fuck is this?" page is: https://www.mercurylang.org/about.html https://www.mercurylang.org/about.html
- ororroro 4mo agoThere are files in this repository that were last touched 32 years ago. Any reason to be posting it now?
- epgui 4mo agoWhy is that relevant or noteworthy? There are files that were updated recently too.
- ororroro 4mo agoWhy the aggression? This language while cool has existed for decades and never taken off. I just wanted a reason to believe it relevant so I could have an excuse to take another look.
- hackyhacky 4mo agoWhy do you think "oldest untouched file" is a good metric for relevance? Do you know what is the oldest untouched file in gcc or Python?
- epgui 4mo agoThere was no aggression.
- srean 4mo ago"Taking off" is an unreliable metric of capability and fitness to a problem you may want solved.
- kaonwarb 4mo agoNot that it necessarily applies here, but as a heuristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
- ororroro 4mo agoInteresting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.
- KnuthIsGod 4mo agoLast release was in 2023. It is effectively dead. This is a terrible shame, because this would have been an nice modern alternative to Prolog.
- jamwise 4mo agoBut the repo has had fairly consistent commits since then. Not huge activity, but not sure I'd call it dead.
- kryptiskt 4mo agoLast commit was 2 minutes ago. Seems like a better measure than releases, different projects have different release cadences.
- wduquette 4mo agoYou say “dead”, I say “stable”. Not everyone wants to base their work on a moving target.
- 5- 4mo agoprince, a high quality html renderer used for typesetting, is written in mercury: https://www.princexml.com/doc/acknowledgements/ https://www.princexml.com/doc/acknowledgements/
- srean 4mo agoWas it written in Prolog at any point in time ? Perhaps I am misremembering, but my brain is telling me of a CSS or PDF parser written in Prolog.
- mattgoupil 4mo agoSomething you might find interesting to look at is Rego, a datalog-derived language been used for writing security policies. Rego is dynamically typed, so no real protection. It's input is basically JSON and it can apply JSON-Schema, but that's it. I think it would be interesting to look at Rego as a restricted version of this and see what types buys for a Rego user. It's probably one of the larger areas of logic programming and has brought people into the fold, so to speak.