Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wac 4860 days ago
I always that thought that the only language that made logical sense for philosophers to use was prolog.
2 comments

Or SQL. After teaching a couple of classes in logic, it's quite easy to get the gist of. In fact, as I was wrapping up grad school (in philosophy, as it happens), I suggested that if people weren't going to go on and teach philosophy, they should become DBAs (rather than law school, for instance).
I was expecting someone saying lisp instead of prolog.
Lisp and prolog are old languages that have had their day and largely been marginalized by more practical ones. Prolog was intended for AI and NLP but overtime the rigid grammar approaches have been obsoleted by statistical ones with far greater success. These days AI and NLP are more commonly found in java or python. Watson, for example, is written in java. Lisp is great for things like genetic algorithms because there's no distinction between code and data, it's a homoiconic language.