Reflections on Automation, Learnability and Expressiveness in Logic-Based Programming Languages

This position paper sketches an analysis of the essential features that logic-based programming languages will need to embrace to compete in a quickly evolving field where learnability and expressiveness of language constructs, seen as aspects of a learner’s user experience, have become dominant decision factors for choosing a programming language or paradigm. Our analysis centers on the main driving force in the evolution of programming languages: automation of coding tasks, a recurring promise of declarative languages, instrumental for developing software artifacts competitively. In this context we will focus on taking advantage of the close correspondence between logic-based language constructs and their natural language equivalents, the adoption of language constructs enhancing the expressiveness and learnability of logic-based programming languages and their synergistic uses in interacting declaratively with deep learning frameworks.