Okay

so welcome to

yeah

welcome to AR1 and we're doing the first really AI1-y technical

thing.

That's the Prolog language.

Prolog was one of the original AI-inspired languages,

actually symbolic AI-inspired languages

because with its recursive nature it was ideally suited

or it was at least thought to be ideally suited

and it's actually true

for doing symbolic AI.

And it's been extremely influential in early AI

and it's still a language where you can write down

little cool ideas very well.

It is, however, not a programming language that is kind of modern in

any sense.

It lacks a type system, it lacks a module system, it lacks a good library system,

and all of the things that you need to make kind of bigger software ecosystems.

Writing a big

software project over multiple years in Prolog is torture, so don't do it.

We use it as a didactic

tool.

But ideas of this language have essentially taken good hold in programming overall, so it's

considered one of the big three programming paradigms.

Imperative programming, I'm assuming

all of you are experienced in that.

Functional programming, where you basically do recursive

programming with functions that have big advantages for being able to verify or understand or control

what your program does.

In particular, you can have type systems that kind of rule out whole classes

of errors.

Completely that plague you in imperative programming like C or C++ or all of those.

And only very

very recently with languages like Rust do we have comparably strong type systems in

imperative programming languages.

And the Rust type system is, I'm not going to say mouthful,

but a brain full.

It takes some doing until you're well worse than that.

And declarative programming

essentially has the advantage

and that's something we've already seen in the introduction.

That is, it is relatively near to how people think.

If you think about in the imperative world,

we often have these big specifications.

What is my program supposed to do?

Right?

And if it's a

big project, these specifications can be very big.

So very often the specifications are somewhat in