Some of us have seen these kinds of fads many, many times.
XML, Corba, Java, Startups, etc, etc.
Pump and dump.
Smart people collect the money from idealists.
Here in Finland, we have a good trial population: Finnish-Swedes.
They are genetically very similar to Finns, but despite being bi-lingual, and wealthier than native population, they are very slightly duller. (1-3 iq points).
I suppose it is a bit spartan, but it has a ton of functionality that I find indispensable [1]. For example, when I place my cursor on a variable in the editor it highlights all the variables that unify with it in the same clause, and it will highlight singleton variables in a different colour so you can catch errors caused by typos easily. It is also aware of things like imported predicates, undefined or dynamic predicates, multi-file predicates etc, and will highlight them accordingly. It has some (limited) auto-complete and code-expansion etc. and a status line that gives you very good information about the kind of term you have your cursor on - where it's defined if it's a predicate, its name and arity and how many clauses etc, basically much of the information you can get from querying the program database with various program inspection built-ins. Some of my colleagues use VS Code to write Prolog instead and I keep shaking my head and grumbling about the errors they keep making that they wouldn't if they used the SWI-Prolog IDE instead. Kids, these days. In my youth, we wrote all our Prolog on Notepad! And compiled on Dos!
(nope. never)
SWI also has a graphical debugger, which however I never use:
I moved to academia, after six years of working in the industry mainly with C# and SQL. It was a deliberate attempt to find a way to work with Prolog. I guess that's a bit immature of me but I fell in love with Prolog in the second year of my CS degree and I couldn't get over it so here I am.
I did an MSc in data science first, then started a PhD to study Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), which is basically machine learning × Prolog (although there's also ASP ILP these days). I got my PhD last summer and I'm now doing a post-doc on a robotics project with Meta-Interpretive Learning (MIL), a recent form of ILP. Here's my latest publication:
Which is still a bit proof-of-concept. We're still at the very early stages of practical applications of MIL and so there's a lot of foundation work to do. Bliss :)
You might want to look at the Icon programming language. I fell in love with it long ago, but I did not go the academic route to use it more, I just accepted that it wouldn't be a part of my work life. Later -much later- I found jq, with which I had more success in industry. Both are very much like logic programming languages in that they have pervasive (DFS) backtracking.
I hope you enjoy it! I sure did. If you enjoy it, you might also enjoy jq (https://github.com/jqlang/jq), which is also a sort of logic programming language (in that it has pervasive generators and backtracking). Icon has an Algol family syntax, while jq is more... Haskell-ish? in a way if you squint hard? Whereas Prolog is a pile of rules. These differences are very interesting. Verse is another language in this vein, and it seems very interesting as well.
