I'm a logic fan so I like prolog a lot, though for many people admittedly its greatest attribute will be expanding the way you think about programming. However

I'm a logic fan so I like prolog a lot, though for many people admittedly its greatest attribute will be expanding the way you think about programming. However for some problems you might want to go right to constraint programming as you mentioned if you need speed and ease of modeling. I like MiniZinc for many problems, or if you're interested you could try my constraint programming language (http://sabrlang.org http://sabrlang.org) which is based on spatial and temporal logic.