Did Erlang borrow from Ada?

[Marc van Woerkom]

>But, as you hint, Prolog probably suffered more than
>others from never having the execution model explained
>clearly enough for the beginners.

I got Turbo Prolog on a 5.25" floppy about 15 years ago, 
and I had absolutely no clue what it was about.
Few years ago, I encountered it in a computer science 
lecture on logical and functional programming.
Then I understood the basic principle a bit better.
I know the unification algorithm from reading it, but if I 
wanted to come up with a similiar one, I probably need a 
theoretical computer science lecture on logic to 
understand why it works that way.

So the theoretical overhead is much higher, than with 
other languages. Perhaps one can use prolog without 
knowing the details, I don't know. I would not feel very 
comfortable that way. On the other hand, knowing that a 
system like prolog gives the same resuls like a imperative 
language, was   one of the highlights of my present 
studies in computer science, probably one of the bits that 
makes the difference to just a programmer.

Java, on the other hand, frustrated me, because it seemed 
so much like a C++ for dummies language.

It will be interesting to see, if the average future 
software development stays on a level like Java/VB/PHP.. 
or if there will be more advances.
Programming today uses more theory than the languages of 
the 80ies, so there is some progress.

But I somehow doubt that the mainstream will pick up 
advanced stuff like prolog, standard ml, Erlang, haskell, 
ocaml and so on.

Regards,
Marc