[coliveira]

Prolog is not dead, it just has a niche following. Similar to Lisp and Smalltalk, two other languages mentioned in the article. Prolog suffers even more because it requires programmers to think differently -- Lisp and Smalltalk programs can still be written in a procedural style.

Prolog offers at lot of the same things that Lisp also does: symbolic processing, meta-programming, among others. One of the tricks of Lisp programmers is to implement Prolog in Lisp and use it for the areas it is strong. Just read "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence" to see how this is done.

[silentbicycle]

make (and its many variants) are probably the closest thing to a logic programming language most people have used. Like Prolog, some programmers just don't (and won't) ever learn to think natively in its model of computation. Trying to force make to act like a procedural language leads to convoluted makefiles.

[microtonal]

Or the "Reasoned Schemer". Unfortunately, most such implementations are slow compared to Prolog AMs.

[coliveira]

Agreed, that's why I think it makes sense to use the real thing. But commercial Lisp compilers have Prolog implementations that I suspect are better than the ones appearing on text books.