I think a lot of the difficulty in Prolog comes down to the fact that you can read Prolog programs three ways: as a restricted form of first order logic (Horn clauses), as a procedure, and as an execution model. The last is double confusing because almost all programmers are used to controlling the execution model and Prolog demands that you relinquish a lot of control there ("Algorithm = logic + control" by Kowalski talks about this a bit). You also cannot ignore any of them because any non-trivial Prolog program exploits all three.
Yeah I think that's right. I'm doing Advent of Code in Prolog at the moment and checking other people's solutions -- I've yet to see 2 Prolog solutions which are mostly the same. The admixture you described results in code that aligns very closely with the thinker, and less closely with a specific procedure. Its very weird to see.
Having said that -- once you get Prolog and use it for a while, your brain (at least my brain) wants to replace EVERYTHING with Prolog.
