qohen

Were they? [0]

A legitimate early use of personal computers was to replace the typewriter, as the modest requirements of basic word processing lent themselves well to the equally modest capabilities of these early machines.

By the early 1980s, the word processing market was dominated by two main rivals: WordPerfect and WordStar. Microsoft wasn’t even in the running yet, as the 1983 MS-DOS release of what would become Microsoft Word (then called Multi-Tool Word) came and went with hardly a splash.

This article [1] on use of word processors by well-known authors in the early 80's (and before) is worth reading too.

Oh, and as far as memory goes, remember these devices had floppy drives that could store at least 360Kb and, in March 1983, the IBM PC XT came out with a 10MB hard drive.

The Chinese army crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests killed at least 10,000 people, according to newly released UK documents.

The figure was given in a secret diplomatic cable from then British ambassador to China, Sir Alan Donald.

The original source was a friend of a member of China's State Council, the envoy says.

I posted an excerpt of the manual, with a link to a PDF of it, in a reply to another comment [0]

(And, since even the earliest versions of Prolog were interpreted, they may've had features like this too).

And, as far as editors are concerned, people still use versions of vi (and, of course, emacs) to this day by people who don't necessarily do lots of planning and correctness before deciding to input the code into the computer.

Interactive Environment Performance is all very well. What the programmer really needs is a good inter-active environment for developing his programs. To address this need, DEC-10 Prolog provides an interpreter in addition to the compiler.

The interpreter allows a program to be read in quickly, and to be modified on-line, by adding and deleting single clauses, or by updating whole procedures. Goals to be executed can be entered directly from the terminal. An execution can be traced, interrupted, or suspended while other actions are performed. At any time, the state of the system can be saved, and resumed later if required. The system maintains, on a disk file, a complete log of all interactions with the user's terminal. After a session, the user can examine this file, and print it out on hard copy if required.

Yes, they do -- that's why people have enjoyed using such languages.

It might help to think of them as being like very-high-level scripting-languages with more rigorous semantics (e.g. homoiconicity) and some nifty built-ins, like Prolog's relational-database. (Not to mention REPLs, tooling, etc.)

Read, for example, what Paul Graham wrote about using Lisp for Viaweb (which became Yahoo Store) [0] and understand that much of what he says applies to languages like Prolog and Smalltalk too.

Like Lisp and Smalltalk, Prolog was used primarily in the 1980s, so it was run on Unix workstations and also, to some extent, on PCs. (There were even efforts to create hardware designed to run Prolog a la Lisp machines.)

And, like Lisp and Smalltalk, Prolog can be very nice for iterative development/rapid prototyping (where the prototypes might be good enough to put into production).

The people who dealt with Prolog on punchcards were the academics who created and/or refined it in its early days. [0]

From less than 2 weeks ago: "How MongoDB Atlas’s Forced Upgrades and Support Policies Drove Us to PostgreSQL" [0] -- TL;DR: MongoDB lost a $50K/yr Atlas contract due to the way they do things.