From: Christopher Browne
Subject: Re: newbie question:Is prolog language just used in the lab for product's model design?
Date:
Message-ID: <buehk5$grt2e$1@ID-125932.news.uni-berlin.de>
The classic _problem_ with that approach to things is that it often
does not succeed.
You build a Prolog (or Lisp, or ML, or ...) prototype that is a _bit_
too slow for production use, and the Powers That Be decide to recode
it all in C++ in order to make it 4 times faster.
Unfortunately, the rewrite project takes two years, makes the
resulting system less powerful, only gets a 3-fold speedup, and this
expensive project has a 60% chance of failure due to battles between
developers with brittle personalities over which subset of C++ to use.
(I am making up the statistics, but none of this ought to seem
particularly remarkable...)
And it would have been a vastly more productive effort to tune the
application in Prolog (or Lisp, or APL, or whatever...), and take
advantage of upcoming expected improvements in hardware specs.
Surely 2 years worth of "reimplementation" effort should be able to
find _some_ improvements that might be made to the Prolog code.
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