The first author of this is John Alan Robinson, inventor of the first unification algorithm and thus the first practical resolution theorem proving algorithm, on which Prolog was developed.
I remember reading a history of Prolog, I think by Kowalski, which mentioned that Robinson always preferred Lisp to Prolog, despite it being built on his ideas. I’ll try and dig out a reference.
Edit: I found the article I was thinking of [1], on Maarten van Emden’s blog. Here is the quote:
> A few years later some excited evangelists brought Robinson the news that resolution had led to a new programming language. Robinson was delighted to see some sample programs and an explanation of how resolution was used to execute them. The evangelists took it for granted that henceforth Robinson would program in Prolog. They were disappointed to learn that no, for Robinson Lisp was the one and only programming language and that it could not even be displaced by an elegant embodiment of his own brain child.
Do you know texts about the stratchey / landin school of thought ? I'd love to read about purely denotational interpreters. I found a few things about both but it never explained their ideas in these terms.
I'm glad to see a classic article linked from AITopics. We have a big collection there, as well as articles from NeurIPS, AAAI conferences, AI Journal, and news sources, amounting to 200k+ items, all fully classified into AI topics. Have a look!
While SICP is certainly a great book, more direct to the topic would be a different classic:
Norvig's Paradigms of AI Programming is purely about creating logic & unification systems in Lisp, and the foundation of many codebases still in use today.
I prefer picat or mercury as better and more modern prolog's.
There are not do many logical extensions still, just typesystems and contracts getting better recently (Ada spark, ATS), bug a real prolog with a real SAT solver are way better.
I remember reading a history of Prolog, I think by Kowalski, which mentioned that Robinson always preferred Lisp to Prolog, despite it being built on his ideas. I’ll try and dig out a reference.
Edit: I found the article I was thinking of [1], on Maarten van Emden’s blog. Here is the quote:
> A few years later some excited evangelists brought Robinson the news that resolution had led to a new programming language. Robinson was delighted to see some sample programs and an explanation of how resolution was used to execute them. The evangelists took it for granted that henceforth Robinson would program in Prolog. They were disappointed to learn that no, for Robinson Lisp was the one and only programming language and that it could not even be displaced by an elegant embodiment of his own brain child.
[1]: https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2017/09/08/conceptual-integri...