The Mercury logic programming system

(github.com)

48 points | by Antibabelic 1 day ago

4 comments

  • KnuthIsGod 22 minutes ago
    Last release was in 2023.

    It is effectively dead.

    This is a terrible shame, because this would have been an nice modern alternative to Prolog.

  • ElectroSlayer 2 hours ago
    Oh 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.
  • thechao 1 hour ago
    The closest that I could find to a "what the fuck is this?" page is:

    https://www.mercurylang.org/about.html

  • ororroro 1 hour ago
    There are files in this repository that were last touched 32 years ago. Any reason to be posting it now?
    • kaonwarb 26 minutes ago
      Not that it necessarily applies here, but as a heuristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
      • ororroro 13 minutes ago
        Interesting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.
    • epgui 1 hour ago
      Why is that relevant or noteworthy? There are files that were updated recently too.
      • ororroro 1 hour ago
        Why 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 46 minutes ago
          Why 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?