Porting HaXe to AS3 wouldn't have solved the C++ part of the server component.

Even if I didn't need the C++ part, HaXe way of doing things is very different from Flex. Also, the code for SWF generation required quite a bit of linear algebra, which scared the original developers (the code had to take various properties of display objects and convert them into matrices of affine transformations, because that's how SWF format natively encodes it).

Even after all that, the code would lose a significant portion of performance gained from it being written in HaXe. HaXe made two significant improvements on MXMLC: since it was able to prove type correctness at compile time it removed type checks at run time (that's almost like removing half of the bytecode). And, on top of that, if it was able to resolve a reference during compile time, it generated a more efficient code for lookup (i.e. MXMLC generated code that stacked all contexts within function visibility and whenever a non-local variable was referenced it'd put a call to a function to look through this stack; this especially penalized the code with nested functions).

> Likewise I doubt that the parser being written in C was the problem

Doubt all you want, but it was the problem... Why did you choose to second-guess me if you were never there, never interacted with people in question, never seen the program in question? Like, on what authority do you think you know better?

> the problem was probably that (I assume?) you didnt also provide the convenient python bindings

You guessed wrong...

> Otherwise it's hard to believe that someone would throw away finished code.

You must be new here... I've seen this more times than I can count. Sometimes it's even a good thing.

> seems a bit too lazy.

Being lazy and ignorant is the name of the game. This is what people in general are made of, but when it comes to programmers, they have fewer checks that make other professionals resist being lazy and ignorant.

> don't want to deal with it.

Because, let me repeat it: ignorant and lazy.

> Also I wouldn't want to inherit Prolog code either because it's an ancient niche language, IDE and docs and everything else is probably terrible.

You are also demonstrably ignorant and lazy: you didn't bother to check, and decided to spew a bunch of nonsense.

* What difference does it make in what year was a language created? English is older than Esperanto, does this make English worse? Hebrew is older than English, is Hebrew worse?

* Prolog is alive and well. Multiple language implementations released new versions in the last year. A lot of academic research happens in Prolog because, conceptually, it's newer and more advanced than, say, Java or Python.

* Documentation is fine. Python documentation is a lot worse for example, because it's written by idiots... Python documentation writes simply don't know how to do it well, so it doesn't matter if there are many of them, or how much effort they put into it -- what comes out is garbage.

* I haven't experienced technical problems programming in Prolog. Installed SWI Prolog, wrote some code, ran it, fixed errors, ran it again... nothing out of ordinary. Editor support was not a problem, not anymore than editor's support for Python or any other more popular language.