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Prolog
Raised as a usability problem by 17 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 15 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads in the last 5 years.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Coding algorithms in Prolog is too confusing and hardUnreviewed
20122026- Coding algorithms in Prolog was too confusing and hard to do2025-11-12
- Many people find Prolog's search hard to understand and struggle to structure programs for it2023-06-01
- Real Prolog is a horrible mess that is hell to debug2012-03-25
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 18 complaints
- Hard to find where slowdown lies; accidental search spaces are not localised, no incremental fix path2026-05-18
- Coding algorithms in Prolog was too confusing and hard to do2025-11-12
- Programs run forever or give repeated answers, and debugging is frustrating2025-06-17
- A typo in a functor fails silently with no warning, so finding it took hours2024-10-13
- Must understand interpreter internals to guide it to correct branch2023-09-12
- Many people find Prolog's search hard to understand and struggle to structure programs for it2023-06-01
- Many overlapping ways to do the same thing, confusing beginners with trip hazards2022-12-31
- Hard to debug, and easy to accidentally write exponential algorithms2021-01-05
- User missed the terminating dot after halt, so nothing happened2019-12-09
- Rule order causes sudden unfixable failures that are hard to diagnose2018-11-04
- Writing complex procedural programs is maddening because of cuts and using failure to express success2018-08-02
- System often runs inefficiently, forcing users to rephrase requirements to nudge performance2017-05-31
- Beginners semi-randomly reorder clauses and goals until the program happens to work2017-05-30
- Beginners semi-randomly reorder clauses and goals until programs seem to work2017-05-30
- Compiler picks horribly slow evaluation, forcing rewording of declarations to nudge it2017-05-29
- Some trivial tasks are very hard to do in the language2016-10-08
- Spends all their time getting rule ordering and cuts right, which feels non-intuitive2013-03-08
- Real Prolog is a horrible mess that is hell to debug2012-03-25