programming is terriblelessons learned from a life wasted

miniKanren is the principal member of an eponymous family of relational (logic) programming languages. Many of its critical design decisions are a reaction to those of Prolog and other well-known 5th-generation languages. One of the differences is that, while a typical Prolog implementation might be thousands of lines of C code, a miniKanren language is usually implemented in somewhere under 1000 lines. Though there are miniKanren languages of varied sizes and feature sets, the original published implementation was 265 lines of Scheme code. In those few lines, it provides an expressiveness comparable to that of an implementation of a pure subset of Prolog.

We argue, though, that deeply buried within that 265-line miniKanren implementation is a small, beautiful, relational programming language seeking to get out.