Prolog Served DRY
14 Mar 2017I believe there should be more programming books targetted at experienced programmers. In particular, it seems like most books about programming languages go to great lengths to be accessible to beginners.
But this is actually detrimental to the experience of the experienced programmer, who either wants to get up and running with the language as fast as possible, or to understand what makes the language tick.
Most of the time, I'm firmly in the second category: I want the mental models and implentation details underlying the language. Those are of paramount importance to reach proficiency with the language, yet they are rarely taught explicitly.
At the start of this year, I actually was in a position to do something about this, as I needed to design the lab sessions for our Programming Language Paradigms course. While the (master) students are not exactly experienced in the traditional sense, they already have at least 3 languages under their belts and are quite capable of handling what we throw at them.
The first language we cover is Prolog. There are three lab sessions on the topic and I have now made them available on Github.
If you're interested in Prolog, give them a spin. You might find them interesting, maybe not all that easy, and – I hope – enlightening.