mentat VS paip-lisp

Why did Mozilla abandon the Mentat database?

There is (now unmaintained) project called Mentat [0] from Mozilla.

[0] https://github.com/mozilla/mentat

Mozilla was working on the opposite, a Datalog of SQLite, with Mentat, now abandoned: https://github.com/mozilla/mentat

Strikes me as a basically sound idea and it would be lovely if someone picked up the ball.

mentat was archived by mozilla back in 2017, but there are a bunch of forks. Because github is dumb and has a terrible interface for exploring forks [0], I used the Active GitHub Forks tool [1] that helped to find:

qpdb/mentat [2] seems to be the largest (+131 commits) and most recently modified (May this year) fork of mozilla/mentat.

[0]: https://github.com/mozilla/mentat/network/members - Seriously, how am I supposed to use this? Hundreds of entries, but no counts for stars, contributors, or commits, no details about recent commits. Just click every one?

[1]: https://techgaun.github.io/active-forks/index.html

[2]: https://github.com/qpdb/mentat

There are plenty of open source Datomic Inspired databases. Check out https://github.com/juji-io/datalevin and scroll down all the way down to “Alternatives”. There was even the beginning of a rust one by Mozilla: https://github.com/mozilla/mentat

I think you might be slightly misreading things, from what you quoted it’s about the query language (sql vs Datalog) not the database engine, that would likely be SQLite in any case. Now whether grafting a Datalog query engine onto SQLite is a good idea is a different question (though it’s been done, eg https://github.com/mozilla/mentat), but we should all at least talk about the same thing :)

You might be interested in the now defunct Mentat project from Mozilla. They made an EAV store with syncing on top of sqlite. It ran datalog queries by translating them into sql.

https://github.com/mozilla/mentat

Have you seen https://stevelosh.com/blog/2018/08/a-road-to-common-lisp/ ? "Kludges" everywhere is applicable. On the other hand, having a function like "row-major-aref" that allows accessing any multi-dimensional array as if it were one dimensional is "sweeter than the honeycomb".

I still think CL code can be beautiful. Norvig's in PAIP https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp is nice.

As for the inside-out remark, while technically you do it, you don't have to, and it's very convenient to not do. Clojure has its semi-famous arrow macro that lets you write things in a more sequential style, it exists in CL too, and there's always the venerable let* binding. e.g. 3 options:

    (loop (print (eval (read))))

PAIP by Peter Norvig, Chapter 23, Compiling Lisp

https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter23...

Emacs is so much more than a text editor! But I need to stay on topic...

I believe your assessment of LISP (and therefore of MacArthy)'s impact on AI to be unfair. Just a few days ago https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp was discussed on this site, for example.

Sounds like a great project idea to make a toy demo of this direction you'd like to see. Maybe comparable to https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter15... and https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter8.... which are a few hundred lines of Lisp each, but do enough to be interesting.

You could look into Paradigms of AI Programming by Peter Norvig which might interest you regardless of Lisp content.

Lisp has great power, examine PAIP, part II chapters 7 and 8.

A computer running Prolog reasons, and that only requires a couple of pages of code. So it seems feasible that the network could have learned some ability to reason within its network.

IMHO it's because lisp shines to manipulate symbols whereas the current AI trend is crunching matrices.

When AI was about building grammars, trees, developing expert systems builds rules etc. symbol manipulation was king. Look at PAIP for some examples: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

This paradigm has changed.

Origen: Conversación con Bing, 4/4/2023(1) gigamonkey/monkeylib-binary-data - GitHub. https://github.com/gigamonkey/monkeylib-binary-data Con acceso 4/4/2023. (2) paip-lisp/chapter4.md at main · norvig/paip-lisp · GitHub. https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter4.md Con acceso 4/4/2023. (3) bibliography.md · GitHub. https://gist.github.com/gigamonkey/6151820 Con acceso 4/4/2023.