The Mercury logic programming system
github.comOh 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.
There are files in this repository that were last touched 32 years ago. Any reason to be posting it now?
Not that it necessarily applies here, but as a heuristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Interesting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.
Why is that relevant or noteworthy? There are files that were updated recently too.
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.
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?
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.
But the repo has had fairly consistent commits since then. Not huge activity, but not sure I'd call it dead.
The closest that I could find to a "what the fuck is this?" page is: