It’s been more than 30 years since I took a (very basic) course in logic programming in general and Prolog in particular, so I can’t read the level of sarcasm in the text, but: Surely, when a course places various artificial limitations on programming, like “hands off the standard library”, the reason is that they are not trying to teach you to be productive Prolog (or whatever language) programmers, they are trying to teach you basic principles, and truly internalizing those principles often (not for everyone!) requires swimming around in them for a while. In Lisp, you are not just supposed to know that you can write a tail-recursive function for something, you are supposed to have done it so many times that you can do it almost without thinking. In calculus, you are not supposed to look up the derivative of arcsin in a table, you are supposed to <i>feel</i> it, so that to immediately see that that subsituting t=sin(x) makes that integral much nicer. They are not training you to use the standard library, they are training you to write it.<p>Admittedly, teachers sometimes seem to lose track of this and assign busywork exercises for no good reason.