"Datafun: a functional query language" by Michael Arntzenius
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as an approachable talk on a total functional generalization of Datalog, by the language's author.
What it is
Michael Arntzenius's Strange Loop talk on Datafun, a functional query language that brings database-style querying into a general-purpose language. It discusses bridging database theory and programming languages.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2018 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends a-saleh · 2018-05 · on “A relatively simple Datalog engine”
"Streams of solution trees" kinda reminds me of mikro-kanren [1]. When I was using Clojure roughly 3 years ago, kanren was quite popular embedded logic. W.r.t. Datafun, i learned about it from a talk its creator gave on strangeloop last year [2], for me it seemed quite approachable :) [1] [LINK] [2] [this video]
Recommends fogzen · 2025-06 · on “Implementing Logic Programming”
Yes, for some kinds of operations on some kinds of data structures. The keyword/property is "monotonicity". Monotonic functions are guaranteed to terminate under fixed-point semantics. Look into Datafun: A total functional language that generalizes Datalog. Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk. [LINK] [this video]
Cites tracnar · 2022-07 · on “Why Can't Database Tables Index Themselves? (2006)”
This talk explored a bit that idea, you could have a (full) programming language which is more like SQL so you get good enough datastructures (and indexing- without manual tuning: [this video] I think Prolog (another commenter pointed it out) and datalog do this to some extend.
Cites refset · 2023-03 · on “Deconstructing Datalog [pdf]”
Thanks for sharing the summary. There's also this Strange Loop 2017 talk "Datafun: a functional query language" with an early overview of this research: [this video]