Random musings on random stuff.
The famous lisp quote - "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran
program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow
implementation of half of Common Lisp" - make me think of something else
today. Specifically I've been building a system where users enter data,
someone else enters rules (which are data) and the system goes away and
infers more data and then more things to do. That made me realise
this:
"Any sufficiently complicated data rich system, which responds based on rules stored as data contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Prolog."
Now, I'm not saying about to suddenly jump ship and just start writing
prolog everywhere, but it's
(to me) a useful realisation.