Hi all, I need some advice. I'm going to be at a conference giving a presentation about logic programming to a bunch of Perl programmers. However, after reviewing the notes of my presentation, I've realized that I have a more daunting task than I realized and I'm beginning to second-guess my approach. I possibly go in a couple of different directions.
One approach is to start by showing them the basics of embedding Prolog in Perl (http://search.cpan.org/dist/AI-Prolog/ and http://search.cpan.org/dist/Language-Prolog-Yaswi/) and show them beginning Prolog (family trees, the append function, and maybe a simple text adventure). The advantage is the programmers get a chance to understand how to actually use this stuff. This was my initial approach. However, it's been pointed out to me by several people that the smaller the example, the more difficult it is to show the strength of logic programming (the multiple uses of append/3 are cool, but people want to know how this helps them write purchase order software.) The other approach is, instead, to give them a tiny taste of *how* Prolog works and then show a powerful example or two that's difficult to replicate in an imperative, OO, or functional environment. I've considered snarfing an example or two from "The Art of Prolog" by Sterling and Shapiro, but I'm not sure of the legal implications and, in any event, I don't know if I'd have enough time to really get those examples across. My question in a nutshell: given 45 minutes to show a roomful of programmers with no prior experience in logic programming just how powerful it can be, what approach would you take? Do you have any particular sample applications that would be worthwhile? Everything that I've come up with seems too small to really be more than a toy or too large to show in 45 minutes. Cheers, Ovid If this message is a response to a question on a mailing list, please send follow up questions to the list. Web Programming with Perl -- http://users.easystreet.com/ovid/cgi_course/
