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Many many languages that you will encounter and use in live projects are primarily imperative, eg: C, C++, JavaScript. The describe the "how" and "in what order".

While I was an undergrad I was exposed to Standard ML and Prolog, both of which were/are much more about declarative "what", though they could only practically interact with the actual world by side-effects and some imposed ordering (SML's 'ref', Prolog's cut).

I am still waiting for some of the amazing stuff that was in SML to materialise in C++ and Java for example, less so anything from Prolog. For example, to search a state space I might use an off-the-shelf solver with good heuristics and an objective function written in something imperative rather than use Prolog.

But it it really is over 30Y since I touched Prolog, so life in it may be very different now.



Pretty interesting stuff, thanks for sharing :D




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