Lambda the Ultimate

The biggest single reason is probably common origins. LISP and the AI Lab at MIT co-evolved. By the time the post-80's languages existed, the commitment to LISP and prolog among AI people was well established, and the embedded mental base made change difficult. Today, many of the computational problems that underly AI are commonly implemented in other languages. Most of today's leading SAT solvers are implemented in C or C++ for performance reasons, and modern provers all seem to be implemented in some variant of ML.

Assuming we get it out there successfully, it will be interesting to see whether BitC invades either of those niches a bit. The language supports, but does not mandate, pure programming, which *might* make it a candidate for provers (I am skeptical because of the minimal core logic challenge, but let's see). It ought to be able to get all of the performance of C for things like SAT solvers. I don't say that it will invade either space, and I'm starting to feel like I should shut up about the BitC stuff until we get it released. So chalk this up as an "I'm curious and interested" rather than any sort of "today, we are going to take over the world" sort of thing.

to BitC getting out there and taking over the world :-)

Historically more neats than scruffies got research funding. As a result the driving focus in AI research was dominated by the idea that a sufficiently powerful logic would allow us to describe an AI. For this reason functional and logical languages were a good fit; they looked similar to the type of clean mathematical approach being tried.

Then machine learning came along and showed that throwing lots of algorithmic approaches at well defined problems created progress quickly. The main requirement in ML research tends to be lots of number-crunching ability. Although Prolog is still quite common in areas of ML (such as Inductive Logic Programming) I suspect that something that allows people to try out number-crunching approaches (like Matlab) is currently the most popular.

It would appear, after several decades of deadlock, that neither the neat, nor the scruffie approach is enough by itself. It seems reasonable to believe that the next popular language for AI will be something that combines raw number-crunching performance with clean logical semantics. It will be interesting to see what such a language looks like, as going by the past few decades of language research, the answer is not obvious.

One other nice feature of Prolog and Lisp for AI research is their reflectivity. When you are reasoning about the mapping between a problem domain and strategies for operating within that domain, not having an extra interpretative layer in the way is very productive.

Indeed. Consider the challenge of hiring kernel hackers in Baltimore...

I should also have mentioned SQL, probably...

You are dead on, as far as my experience goes. I would only add that even before machine learning I found the connection (hype?) between reflection/symbol manipulation and AI dubious, and I am sure I wasn't the only one.

[Caveat lector: in this thread, ML means Machine Learning.]

Except in shap's above remark about theorem provers. :-}