As someone who has developed a somewhat weird obsession with Prolog, I can highly recommend Markus Triska's other articles on Prolog. His article on meta-interpreters [0] was particularly inspiring for me.

[0] https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/prolog_misc/acomip....

There's something quite illuminating with this first "horror", where they basically say "it's OK to report wrong answers, because you can check the answers".

I don't think I've ever felt like it's OK for my program to provide a list of answers where some are right and some are wrong, but reading this... and generally believing in P != NP.... maybe that's a decent way of looking at some stuff!

What do people use Prolog for in the real world? I learned about it on a university course and it seems so esoteric compared to other things on the course. Like something invented just for computer scientists to enjoy.

If you want to understand prolog, you must understand the four-port model:

https://grack.com/writing/school/enel553/report/prolog.html

now we may have a more powerful "Prolog" - LLM Agent, though not precise and correct somtimes.

Mostly overblown.