Fresh Hacker News | The Mercury logic programming system

▲The Mercury logic programming system(github.com)

60 points by Antibabelic 2 days ago | 5 comments

▲5- 29 minutes ago

prince, a high quality html renderer used for typesetting, is written in mercury:

https://www.princexml.com/doc/acknowledgements/

Oh wow, Zoltan was one of my lecturers at UniMelb, and in one semester we were tasked with learning his Mercury language. So good to see it thriving still.

▲zeafoamrun 33 minutes ago

I TA-ed for Zoltan's 2nd year "learning how to use bash/gdb/etc" class and it was a lot of fun. I hope they're still teaching that class.

▲ororroro 5 hours ago

There are files in this repository that were last touched 32 years ago. Any reason to be posting it now?

▲kaonwarb 4 hours ago

Not that it necessarily applies here, but as a heuristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

▲ororroro 3 hours ago

Interesting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.

▲zeafoamrun 1 hour ago

I always understood it was a teaching language for students who wanted to get programming language implementation experience.

▲zeafoamrun 31 minutes ago

Damn dude you're making me feel old

▲epgui 5 hours ago

Why is that relevant or noteworthy? There are files that were updated recently too.

▲ororroro 4 hours ago

Why the aggression? This language while cool has existed for decades and never taken off. I just wanted a reason to believe it relevant so I could have an excuse to take another look.

▲hackyhacky 4 hours ago

Why do you think "oldest untouched file" is a good metric for relevance? Do you know what is the oldest untouched file in gcc or Python?

▲thechao 5 hours ago

The closest that I could find to a "what the fuck is this?" page is:

https://www.mercurylang.org/about.html

▲KnuthIsGod 3 hours ago

Last release was in 2023.

It is effectively dead.

This is a terrible shame, because this would have been an nice modern alternative to Prolog.

▲kryptiskt 1 hour ago

Last commit was 2 minutes ago. Seems like a better measure than releases, different projects have different release cadences.

▲jamwise 3 hours ago

But the repo has had fairly consistent commits since then. Not huge activity, but not sure I'd call it dead.