9K views · Oct 2, 2017 · 42:31 · 2 HN recommenders · 4 mentions · discussed 2018–2025
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.
Why Hacker News points people here: HN recommends it as an approachable talk on a total functional generalization of Datalog, by the language's author.
“Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk.”HN comment, 2025
“for me it seemed quite approachable :)”
Approachable Strange Loop talk on Datafun
"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
“Also be sure to watch Datafun author Michael Arntzenius's Strangeloop talk.”
Datafun author explains a total functional Datalog generalization
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
“This talk explored a bit that idea”
Talk explores SQL-like language with automatic indexing
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.
“with an early overview of this research”
Early overview of Datafun research
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
