PROLOG: THE OTHER BOOK ON MY DESK

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of The Agile Software Engineering Deep Dive, Alessandro Guida revisits Prolog, the logic programming language that once stood close to the heart of symbolic artificial intelligence.The episode starts with a personal memory from the beginning of his career, where Turbo Pascal and Turbo Prolog sat side by side on the desk, representing two very different ways of thinking about software.Turbo Pascal was about telling the computer what to do. Prolog suggested something stranger and still fascinating: describe facts, rules, and relationships, then ask the machine what follows from them.The episode explores Prolog’s origins, why it became popular in the age of expert systems and symbolic AI, what makes its programming model so different, and why its ideas still matter in areas such as rule engines, constraint solving, static analysis, explainable reasoning, and modern AI discussions.It is also a critical look at Prolog’s place today, because while it may not be the natural choice for most modern software systems, it remains a powerful reminder that programming is not only about instructions.Sometimes it is about knowledge, relationships, and the questions we ask.Support the showThis Podcast is an audio version of the written Agile Software Engineering newsletter.  If you want to go deeper, don't forget to subscribe the newsletter too.