Dyna – Logic Programming for Machine Learning

matthewfl

It's nice to discover my PhD research trending on Hacker news.

https://matthewfl.com/papers/mfl-dissertation.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXRvba2yjY0

versteegen

This language seems quite similar to Scallop [1], which was recently posted to HN [2]. Both are extensions of Datalog to arbitrary semirings, meaning that they generalise assigning merely true or false to relational statements, allowing probabilistic reasoning and more (almost arbitrary tagging of statements). Scallop is further focused on being differentiable and being able to integrate Scallop code into a PyTorch function. Both seem to have quite a bit of work put into them and have JIT compilers (Scallop also has a GPU implementation). I like the sound of "I have further modernized Dyna to support functional programming with lambda closures and embedded domain-specific languages." [3]

Going to try it out.

[1] https://www.scallop-lang.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43443640

[3] https://matthewfl.com/research#phd

refset

> Dyna3 — A new implementation of the Dyna programming language written in Clojure

There are some epic looking Clojure namespaces here, e.g. this JIT compiler https://github.com/argolab/dyna3/blob/master/src/clojure/dyn...

brokencode

I'd be fascinated to hear about the author's experience using Clojure for something as complex as a compiler. Was the lack of types an issue? Or was the simplicity and flexibility of the language worth the tradeoff?

binary132

I believe lisps are commonly thought of as being good for writing compilers, and Clojure has more features than your average lisp.

aeonik

I just finished a bit of spelunking in the Clojure Repo of Dyna3, and I got the distinct feeling that I had just stumbled upon an alien artifact from the future.

https://github.com/argolab/dyna3

tomrod

Would this be useful in a production system today?

matthewfl

The focus of this work was a research project. IMO, a mature system would require a several more person years of work. However, there is nothing stopping you from using it in a production system if you find it useful (there is a python, clojure, and java api).

sieabahlpark

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