And one other thing: just because early Prolog interpreters were implemented on punchcards doesn't mean that Prolog programs run by those interpreters needed to be. It's quite possible that basically nobody ever wrote Prolog programs using punchcards, given that Prolog has the ability to read in files of code and data.
By 1979 at the latest -- probably closer to 1975 -- the primary Prolog implementation of the day (Warren's DEC-10 version) had an interpreter, where you could load files of code in and modify the code and you had a REPL with the ability to do all kinds of things.
I posted an excerpt of the manual, with a link to a PDF of it, in a reply to another comment [0]
(And, since even the earliest versions of Prolog were interpreted, they may've had features like this too).
And, as far as editors are concerned, people still use versions of vi (and, of course, emacs) to this day by people who don't necessarily do lots of planning and correctness before deciding to input the code into the computer.
The following is from David H.D. Warren's manual for DEC-10 Prolog, from 1979 [0]. It describes how Prolog development is done interactively, by being able to load code in dynamically into an interpreter and using the REPL -- note that the only mention of using paper is if the developer wants to print out a log of what they did during their session:
Interactive Environment Performance is all very well. What the programmer really needs is a good inter-active environment for developing his programs. To address this need, DEC-10 Prolog provides an interpreter in addition to the compiler.
The interpreter allows a program to be read in quickly, and to be modified on-line, by adding and deleting single clauses, or by updating whole procedures. Goals to be executed can be entered directly from the terminal. An execution
can be traced, interrupted, or suspended while other actions are performed. At
any time, the state of the system can be saved, and resumed later if required.
The system maintains, on a disk file, a complete log of all interactions with the user's terminal. After a session, the user can examine this file, and print it out on hard copy if required.
Languages like Prolog just don't offer that sort of freedom.
Yes, they do -- that's why people have enjoyed using such languages.
It might help to think of them as being like very-high-level scripting-languages with more rigorous semantics (e.g. homoiconicity) and some nifty built-ins, like Prolog's relational-database. (Not to mention REPLs, tooling, etc.)
Read, for example, what Paul Graham wrote about using Lisp for Viaweb (which became Yahoo Store) [0] and understand that much of what he says applies to languages like Prolog and Smalltalk too.
Like Lisp and Smalltalk, Prolog was used primarily in the 1980s, so it was run on Unix workstations and also, to some extent, on PCs. (There were even efforts to create hardware designed to run Prolog a la Lisp machines.)
And, like Lisp and Smalltalk, Prolog can be very nice for iterative development/rapid prototyping (where the prototypes might be good enough to put into production).
The people who dealt with Prolog on punchcards were the academics who created and/or refined it in its early days. [0]
...these things were mostly written(and rewritten till perfection) on paper first and only the near-end program was input into a computer with a keyboard.
Not if you were working in a high-level language with an interpreter, REPL, etc. where you could write small units of code that were easily testable and then integrated into the larger whole.
There's a name for this anti-pattern, the Cobra Effect[0]:
The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
(There may be some question as to whether these events actually occurred or not, but there are similar examples of documented pest-control campaigns (and others) on the Wikipedia page[0] where similar things happened).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceballs:_The_New_One