I had a very similar experience. We went over Prolog for five weeks or so, and while I did thoroughly enjoy learning a whole new paradigm, it still felt like it was just a toy. All programs amounted to `YES` or `NO`, without any building of an interface or other components I'd spent so long learning about. I can definitely identify with the feeling that it wasn't "real" programming.
That being said, one use case which I did find interesting was that of graph theory and graph-based problems. I don't know much about graph theory beyond the basics, but simple things like tree traversal, the Shortest Path Problem, Dijkstra's algorithm, and other things revolving around nodes and edges seemed like a perfect fit for Prolog. You don't have to build a node object and write a bunch of code to create a tree and then a bunch more to traverse it. You just tell it some simple rules, give it a graph, and away you go. It can have incredibly low overhead, at least in terms of line count, for problems like these.
I'm not sure whether or not these properties would make Prolog helpful in solving harder problems than these, but I suspect it would. It's just too simple not to be useful in some cases. Here are the rules, find something that satisfies them.
Comments
I had a very similar experience. We went over Prolog for five weeks or so, and while I did thoroughly enjoy learning a whole new paradigm, it still felt like it was just a toy. All programs amounted to `YES` or `NO`, without any building of an interface or other components I'd spent so long learning about. I can definitely identify with the feeling that it wasn't "real" programming.
That being said, one use case which I did find interesting was that of graph theory and graph-based problems. I don't know much about graph theory beyond the basics, but simple things like tree traversal, the Shortest Path Problem, Dijkstra's algorithm, and other things revolving around nodes and edges seemed like a perfect fit for Prolog. You don't have to build a node object and write a bunch of code to create a tree and then a bunch more to traverse it. You just tell it some simple rules, give it a graph, and away you go. It can have incredibly low overhead, at least in terms of line count, for problems like these.
I'm not sure whether or not these properties would make Prolog helpful in solving harder problems than these, but I suspect it would. It's just too simple not to be useful in some cases. Here are the rules, find something that satisfies them.