Programming in Prolog back in the 1980s was a pleasant experience. I wrote some useful programs with Prolog but as I remember that era, the language made a brief splash and soon relegated to niche settings.

Nowadays I enjoy programming in Scheme which is probably not a whole lot more widespread than Prolog. Using Scheme somehow reminds me of my Prolog experience. Intuitively it seems like these PLs require or stimulate a similar thinking process that appeals to some of us. I haven't pursued this idea, but it lingers in my brain.

Curiously both PLs were developed in the early 1970s and first official versions released in 1975. Is it possible the authors of Scheme knew about and were influenced by Prolog? Not too likely, but Prolog's creators did spend some time at MIT, the birthplace of Scheme, so the odds are a bit better than 0.

I discovered Prolog in my youth, and logic has been something of an addiction ever since - not always, I suspect, a particularly useful one.

Lately, though, I have found what may be an antidote in Emacs, Lisp, and functional programming.

Then again, perhaps I have merely traded one elegant addiction for another.

I actually asked Dr Colmerauer once if the original program code had survived, but sadly he did not believe any of it was still around.

Interesting that Prolog grew out of an NLP project in Marseille rather than a logic-programming research agenda — SLD resolution got attached to it afterward, not the other way round.