[derdi]

You're reading too much into that quote. This is in a section titled "early experiments". It was an initial goal.

There is a lot of historical connection to Prolog, due to the original implementation, and there are syntactic similarities and non-linear pattern matching and dynamic types and a general declarative vibe, but the actual end result of Erlang's evolution, despite the goal of "something like Prolog", is not very much like Prolog at all. Erlang is a functional language, not a logic language. Prolog is a logic language, not a functional language. General goals like in that quote can change over the decade-long development of a language.

[rramadass]

You are stating some obvious things which are not what is being argued here. I only gave the above quote because it is the conclusion that the Erlang designers came to after a lot of research/playing/implementing with other languages (read the full paper and others listed below). I had also stated above that "he conceived Erlang as Prolog-Ideas+Functional/Procedural+Concurrency+Fault-Tolerance." So we already know Erlang is a different language. Note that Robert Virding also states in the Erlog page "due to the fact that Erlang evolved from Prolog". So obviously Prolog was a huge influence on Erlang design (not to be confused with the fact that the first experimentation was done in Prolog) in addition to other systems/languages. The above paper also states "It was a strange mixture, with declarative features (inherited from Prolog), multi-tasking and concurrency (inherited from EriPascal and Ada) and an original combination of error handling mechanisms". The last came from AXE/PLEX and others.

Joe Armstrong wrote two papers The Development of Erlang (linked here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40998632) and a longer A History of Erlang (pdf at https://www.labouseur.com/courses/erlang/history-of-erlang-a...). In addition to his thesis (pdf at https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf) they provide a fascinating study into what goes into the design of a language i.e. lots of messy experiments, shifting goals, inspiration/features from many different languages etc. until everything coalesces into a organic whole which is then validated by users. Reading the above two papers will give you a more complete picture of Prolog's influence on Erlang (in addition to others).

[derdi]

Thanks, I know that history, and nobody is denying the influence. The broader context are your claims about "a lot of commonalities here". There are commonalities, but they are shallow.

[rramadass]

That we have to disagree. Leaving aside the non-Prolog features, much of the Erlang syntax is definitely inspired by Prolog (mentioned in many papers including https://www.erlang.org/faq/academic). That was the reason the HN submission i had referenced which linked to a reference sheet comparing Prolog/Erlang/Elixir was so interesting (direct link https://hyperpolyglot.org/logic). In most cases the Erlang syntax is just a simplified version.

[derdi]

I mentioned the syntactic similarities (and more) above. Syntax is shallow.