ANanonzzzies·Dec 29, 2023Submission
Datafun: A Purely, Total Functional Datalog
2 points · Open discussionrntz
datafun
TeX2016–2023
rntz / datafun
datafun
Research on integrating datalog & lambda calculus via monotonicity types
5Distinct people
7Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
421GitHub stars
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Research on integrating datalog & lambda calculus via monotonicity types
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.
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HN mentions by year7 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-01-18 21:59:31 UTC to 2023-12-29 10:53:57 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
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| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
7 sourcesIt's not quite the same, but how do you feel about Datalog or Prolog? Having a set of facts and being able to make arbitrary relations in them makes for some interesting programming. Especially if you limit your data to a more rigid normal form like RDF tuples. Datafun is also a cool upcoming language in this space https://github.com/rntz/datafun
In Cyclic dependencies are evil (2013)Research on integrating datalog and lambda calculus via monotonicity types
1 points · Open discussionI think it will be better if we figure out how to do embedded catalog in other languages. I.e. I really liked The research here https://github.com/rntz/datafun, where we start with "datalog=relational algebra+fixpoints" and then are trying to figure out how far can we take this in language where not everything is a table of facts :)
In A relatively simple Datalog engineI've just published a draft paper on an entirely different approach to the same problem: instead of creating a higher-order Prolog, we've discovered a functional (and so higher-order) analogue of Datalog, a more limited language (http://www.rntz.net/files/datafun.pdf, on github at https://www.github.com/rntz/datafun)
This idea of a higher-order Prolog is very interesting! But it's not clear to me how it can be truly extensional without further limiting the language. For there is another reason why Prolog is not extensional: non-termination. As a simple example, consider this program:
q(X) :- q(X).
q(adam).
p(adam).
`p` and `q` are logically equivalent (the line `q(X) :- q(X).` is a no-op; of course a predicate implies itself). But in Prolog, `q` is a useless, nonterminating predicate. This problem is not a simple quirk: prova
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bility in even first-order Horn logic is undecidable if you augment it with compound terms & unification (as Prolog does), so there is no general algorithm for deciding Prolog queries.
It looks like extensional higher-order prolog should have the same problem. The article doesn't address it, so I'll go read the papers.
EDIT: The relevant research papers on Higher-Order Prolog, if anybody is interested: http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.3457 "Extensional Higher-Order Logic Programming"; http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.3792 in which they extend it to negation; https://github.com/acharal/hopes the implementation's github repo
Sean McDirmid's work on Glitch is an interesting (and distinctly contra- the current "FP all the things!" zeitgeist) approach to live programming: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/
Conal Elliott's work on Tangible FP was an interesting attempt to unify functional and "visual" programming that has been mostly abandoned: http://conal.net/papers/Eros/
Hopefully some of its ideas may yet survive in other projects.
The Berkeley Orders of Magnitude project is somewhere at the intersection of database and PL research, aimed at handling orders of magnitude more data with orders of magnitude less code: http://boom.cs.berkeley.edu/
The Dedalus language in particular is interesting, as it integrates distributed- and logic-programming: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-17...
Joe Armstrong's thoughts on a modu
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le- or namespace-less programming environment are interesting: http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2011-May/058768...
I've been meaning to write a blog post about the convergence of various ideas of what the future of programming might look like for a while now, so I have a bunch of notes on this topic. The OP & other folks have already mentioned most of the other projects in my notes - in particular Unison, Subtext, Eve, & Bret Victor's work.
My current line of work is on tackling a tiny little corner of what I see as the future's problems - trying to find a better way to combine database/relational programming and functional programming. My work is here (but the docs are almost entirely in type-theory-jargon at the moment, sorry! feel free to shoot me an email if you have questions): https://github.com/rntz/datafun