TimSweeneyEpic

ZZT is the reason I had Turbo Pascal on my computer too!

The idea did take off big-time, just not at the level of C++ compilers and in a more modest way than envisioned. Java and C# both provided reflection interfaces to implement many of the motivating examples for meta-object protocols. Qt (user interface) and Unreal Engine have elaborate semi-automated systems for gathering metadata about C++ objects in order to manipulate them reflectively.

The architects of these systems definitely took inspiration from these meta-object protocol papers and related LISP and Smalltalk efforts. Nobody quite took it all the way, and I suspect that's because the boundaries between compile-time reflection, use site checked macro programming, and declaration site checked type level programming are quite hard to pin down in such a general system.

This example shows that Clojure list comprehensions (the for... syntax) have much of the expressive power of logic programming (the first... syntax).

List comprehensions support a bundle of features including producing multiple values, and filtering them by testing and potentially failing.

Logic programming is that plus some more flexibility (more compositional forms of multiple value production) and some new features (such as using unification to solve for unknowns).

We should expect mainstream languages to evolve to support more logic features, since they provide a more general and more compositional way to do many things. Pattern matching expressions in most languages are a limited special case of logic programming that would benefit from using the more general case. Same with casting constructs, null propagation operators, boolean and/or/not, and the internal compiler logic supporting features like Haskell typeclasses and Rust traits. If we can replace lots of special-case language features a few general constructs, programming will be simpler as Niklaus Wirth advocates for.