This entry was posted on Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at 11:48	and tagged with standard and posted in prolog.	You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
I'm sorry to hear you are stepping down from this role. I know that making Logtalk work with many backend compilers put you in a good position to understand the differences between the different Prolog systems and hence the need for a standard to help converge the implementers. It is the standardisation effort's loss and that in turn is the Prolog community's loss.
I definitely agree with you that the ISO standardisation process is ill-suited to the Prolog community. We are too small a group and too dispersed, so a more inclusive process with accessible resources would help more people get involved and share the load.
Thank you for all your efforts and good luck to the person who tries to step into your shoes.
I know there were few people behind the standardization of Prolog and I don't know the internals of the discussions that you mentioned above, but I'm sorry to hear that you are stepping down as editor of ISO Prolog standardization proposals. I'm sure that the whole community thanks you for all your efforts in this direction.
> I still believe that standardization is vital for the future of Prolog as a programming language.
Hopefully, the community will continue the standardization of Prolog. Both in my academic and industrial work, we were hit by incompatibilities between different Prolog implementations. For instance, while working in IBM with the Prolog interface to the Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA), we ended up having different implementations (both interfaces and internal Prolog modules) for different Prolog systems (Sicstus, SWI, Yap and XSB), while in my academic work at Stony Brook on OpenRuleBench, a benchmarking suite for rule systems, we had to use different predicates (or to parse outputs) to automatically collect statistics from these systems. I am sure other people were hit even worse by these incompatibilities between Prolog systems.
I hope that your efforts will be picked up by the community. These standardization processes are always lengthy and not without arguments. I observed the W3 standardization process of the Rule interchange format (RIF) since both my academic supervisor and one of my IBM mentors were involved into it, and all I can say is that it's a long process with many online meetings. It was a standard backed up by commercial companies (such as Oracle and IBM) and W3C, so, I guess, much larger communities and stronger interest than the Prolog community (developers and users).