>> This expects programmers to have a non-trivial understanding of Prolog's implementation. I was wrong to say that an understanding of the compiler was needed, but programmers do have to understand unification and the order of evaluation used by the language.
Actually, I'd go one step further and say that in order to make full use of Prolog you need to understand SLD resolution and definite clauses, otherwise you'll never really get what the hell is going on in there, or why the interpreter works the way it works. To program in Prolog you do need a non-trivial understanding not only of its implementation but also of the substantial theoretical work that led to its implementation as the prototypical logic programming language (e.g. see J. W. Lloyd, Foundations of Logic Programming).
The thing is, there is a lot more going on with Prolog than "here is a language that can be used to control a digital computer". Logic programming is the continuation of the work of the logicians of the early 19th century, the evolution if you like of mathematical logic. It has to be understood in that context- or not at all.
You make the point that there is an operational, or imperative, reading of Prolog code, that must be understood alongside the declarative one. That is correct, in my opinion, but I don't see why it's a problem. For one thing, programmers taught on imperative languages (i.e. the majority) should not really have a problem with the operational semantics of Prolog (e.g. what you see when you trace Prolog code in the four-port tracer, the order in which goals are called, succeed, fail and are retried etc). Understanding the semantics of the cut is maybe not trivial, but again that is a problem only if someone tried to sell you Prolog as an "easy" or "friendly" language; which it isn't.
More importantly, Prolog has its declarative reading also, which is something almost unique to it. So maybe Prolog is not a perfect, pure implementation of the declarative paradigm- so what? Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater and say, hey, Prolog is only 99% declarative, so I'll just stick with Java, which is 0% declarative? That doesn't make much sense! At least not if you somehow want to use declarative programming- if not, then Prolog is not an option anyway.
>> Finally, I believe that the cut operator also makes parallel processing implementations of Prolog very difficult.
You mean parallel execution of Prolog code? Not parallel implementations of the language? I don't see that the cut is a problem there, but then again I don't have any experience trying to parallelise Prolog code. There is again a promise that Prolog's execution scheme is uniquely disposed to parallel execution. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But that is not the most important characteristic of Prolog.
The most important characteristic, like my previous comment says, is that Prolog is an automated theorem prover for first-order logic theories. Anything else that it may do is by the by- and, conversely, any compromise it has to do on the way there, provided we're talking about pragmatic compromises necessary to get the language to work on limited resources (i.e. like the cut), is worth it.
Of the sources you quote I'm familiar with Clocksin & Mellish, Bratko and Sterling & Shapiro. Those are good books, although Bratko probably tries a bit too hard to make Prolog sound a bit like Pascal. I would also recommend Richard O' Keefe's The Craft of Prolog and George Lugger's "AI Algorithms, Data Structures, and Idioms in Prolog, Lisp, and Java", online here:
http://wps.aw.com/wps/media/objects/5771/5909832/PDF/Luger_0...
>> Perhaps Logic Programming will make a comeback aided by the new advances in automated theorem proving.
Nah, I don't think so. I think it will remain a niche thing, of interest primarily to academics and programmers who like obscure languages. But that's OK. Not every language needs to be Java or Python.