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Nathanba parent
wouldnt it have been easier to port the Haxe code to AS3? afaik both language are very similar. Then you wouldn't have a problem and you wouldnt have to rely on them to learn your codebase. Likewise I doubt that the parser being written in C was the problem, the problem was probably that (I assume?) you didnt also provide the convenient python bindings. Otherwise it's hard to believe that someone would throw away finished code. I myself was in a similar situation once though, I bound to an external java code via JNI and it worked fine. But they ended up rewriting via HTTP calls anyway. Sure it's easier that way but I mean damn.. not even keeping it around as an option or as a benchmark seems a bit too lazy. But I still understood why they did it, it's just a source of possible errors for them and they don't want to deal with it. 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.
crabbone
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.

Nathanba OP
well from your response I think I can guess why you keep running into these problems so often. While superficially you understand that people don't want to do the extra work you don't really understand why nor do you even understand what their problem is with e.g Prolog, Haxe or C. The complex interconnecting reasons around popularity, IDE support, performance, ecosystem, hiring, maintenance burden, security issues are instantly obvious to someone who does the minimum amount of research to understand what is genuinely required of a modern language. The term "old" or "modern" should obviously be understood as a catchall term to make knowledgable people instantly infer that an entire list of ecosystem related things such as e.g package management, IDE or libraries haven't progressed for X, in this case Prolog. Regarding the IDE you don't even list the debugger, it sounds like you literally downloaded and worked with the swi prolog CLI and you were fine with this. Other people are not fine with this because they actually need to work, maintain and expand on this code and they can easily do this with the existing language but can't do this with yours. They don't want to relearn an entire ecosystem that is broken in hundreds if not thousands of ways just because you were able to technically write one console program in a notepad in another language. Obviously the state of the art is not to work with a raw text editor or emacs like it's literally the 80s and do printf debugging. Then add to all of that your disposition to quickly consider people as lazy and ignorant and it makes it clear that they won't even be able to rely on you to fix any future issues because who knows what kind of ego problem will come up that prevents you from just dealing with an issue. If you genuinely don't understand the gigantic editor support difference between Python and Prolog then you are the one that is lazy and it's up to you to change that. I am not lazy for instantly dismissing prolog from one look at their swi prolog website and a tiny google search because I have the experience to understand all these factors as a whole. One look at the swi-prolog website, the prolog syntax and lack of VS or intellij support is enough to know that this language isn't going to be relevant again. Ada actually improved their website and documentation a lot when I pointed the same out to them which was a big surprise because most people don't care they just keep going in the wrong way. Ada still doesn't have a good IDE though and their IDE is far better than what Prolog seems to have.

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