Re: First meeting of our group

Hi David

On 12 Dec 2018, at 01:32, David Booth <david@dbooth.org<mailto:david@dbooth.org>> wrote:

Returning now to my question: What is your take on whether/how we could achieve both the simplicity of a convenient rules language and the control and power of a general-purpose programming language?

Actually, I guess this question is both for you and anyone else who wants to address it.  :)

I guess this question inevitably adds “do we go beyond first-order logic”, “how expressive do we go” and what built-ins to support (if we have any) to the discussion list.

I believe (custom) builtins are very useful as long as they remain clear and maintainable in size. What IMO does not really work leaving the field completely open (like SPARQL functions) and eventually have queries tight-coupled to implementations (e.g., Virtuoso). As long as exchange is limited, the problem is contained, but that’s not what we are going for here I assume.

And having something like a “logics package manager” where your reasoner can simply install the builtins it lacks would be very nice from a developer perspective (but what with reasoning complexity?).


On the subject of debugging: I see proofs playing an important role there, but maybe they don’t go far enough yet.

Best,

Miel