I guess we are supposed to pile on, so I'll add that the author should read "The Art of Prolog" (Sterling & Shapiro) and then "The Craft of Prolog" (O'Keefe).

I always felt like Prolog's ability to execute programs was entirely accidental.

To me, it feels like a data description language that someone discovered could be tricked into performing computation.

In short, "Here are my gripes about Prolog, a language that I don't understand."

It's perfectly fine to not like Prolog, but I do feel that if you're going to write an article about why you don't like it, you should at least spend some time figuring it out first.

He says of the cut operator "This is necessary for optimization but can lead to invalid programs." Imagine if a programmer new to C++ said the same thing of the "break" keyword. That's how ridiculous it sounds. Yes, cut can be used to prune backtracking and eliminate unneeded work, but that's hardly it's purpose. It leads to "invalid" programs (by which I assume he means, programs that do something other than what he wants) only in cases where you are using it wrong. Cut is no more "necessary for optimization" than break is. It's a control structure that you don't understand

Negation (\+) is confusing, and the author correctly provides examples where its meaning is unintuitive when applied to unbound variables. That's because it's not strictly speaking a negation predicate, but rather a "not provable" predicate. In that light, the examples in the article make perfect sense. Yes, Prolog is a programming language, so the order of terms matter, even if the order wouldn't matter in pure logic.

Look, Prolog is a weird language. It has a learning curve. It's not "just another language" in the Java, C++, Pascal, Python mold. I get it. But this article has the flavor of an impatient newbie getting frustrated because he can't be bothered to read the documentation.

I liked the idea behind Prolog, but I absolutely detest the syntax.

IMO it would be better to have something like Prolog as part of a "better designed" language per se. I can't come up with a good proposal myself - language design is hard, including syntax design - but imagine if Prolog would be a part of python. That feature would then be used by more people. (This is just an example; just randomly creeping in features into a more successful language, also often won't work. I am just giving this as an example that MIGHT be better.)

I frequently find myself thinking "this would be a great fit for prolog etc." but always fail when it comes to the execution.

I always come back to prolog to tool around with it but haven’t done a ton.

Bidirectionality has always been super fascinating.

Didn’t know about Picat. 100% going to check it out.

Maybe it's just me, but my gripe is that it looks declarative, but you have to read the code in execution order.

The line reorder issue is evergreen and it seems all languages need to either go through this phase and fix it, or gaslight its users forever that it's "not really a problem".