ActionScript as a teaching language

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 02:07:07AM +0200, Peter wrote:
> I do not understand why Prolog is considered 'painful'. I am no Prolog 
> expert but so far it works fine whenever I need to use it. All the 
> structured programming constructs can be simulated in Prolog but almost 
> nothing that Prolog can do can be duplicated (easily) with something 
> else.

I find a lot of that simulating stuff to be much to painful and weird.
prolog has some very neat uses, but I would not consider it for anything
outside those uses.

Having just seen the nightmare of idiotic questions my wife's last
course at york was like (it was a CS course using lisp and prolog),
there really are things you should not attempt in prolog, even though
they can be done.  Why a CS course would have such assignments is beyond
my imagination.  Maybe the professors hate CS students.  Maybe they just
don't have a clue.  Hopefully neither.  To me if you do a course on
prolog and lisp, having questions that show the strengths of the
languages would make much more sense than trying to do symbolic
computation problems in lots of weird ways with them.  It may not have
been too bad in lisp, but the prolog stuff sure looked nuts.  I don't
know how my wife managed to make most of those things work, but she did,
it just took 20 to 30 hours of work a week to do it.

I generally wouldn't try to do lots of text processing in C either,
because perl makes that much simpler.

Len Sorensen
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