It bemuses me to read about people who are seriously working on artificial intelligence using stone-age programming languages like C++ or, heaven forbid, Java. Take this following backstory excerpt, for example:

Sure, the thinking machine might not get finished in the 3 months that our seed money would last us. But, in the meantime, to tide us over, we’d solve a simpler problem: we’d use some of the bits and pieces of our unfinished AI engine to predict the financial markets.

The technical co-founders and I had been working on the first version of the AI engine for many months, by the time the seed funding came in. A healthy amount of software code existed (although the code itself wasn’t entirely healthy). ...

Now that we knew what we were doing better, we moved further and further away from the brain as a concrete design inspiration. ...

We found the increasing complexity of the various agents in the system was stressing the codebase. After a lot of difficult debate, we decided to grit our teeth and rewrite the core of the system from scratch. ...

Cassio proved to be an outstanding manager as well as an excellent software engineer and designer, and we let him accumulate assistants until, at one point, we had 60 people there out of a total company staff of 130. ...

We were quickly realizing what should have been obvious from the get-go – that getting our thinking machine to work could well be a multi-year pursuit. ...

The Webmind system we had a month ago consisted of over 750,000 lines of Java code. ... Most of the 750,000 lines of Java is still useful — it covers issues like communicating with other software processes, balancing processing among different machines, reading parameters from files, and so on and so forth. Necessary infrastructure. ...

I reckon that, at this point, I’m at serious risk of becoming the Charles Babbage of AI. Babbage designed the first computer — a purely mechanical computer, pre-electronics. But it was just too damn complicated to build using the technology he had at his disposal. He spent all his money and his life on it, and never got it done.

— Ben Goertzel, Waking Up from the Economy of Dreams

If you’re going to attempt scaling the formidable, cloud-obscured peak of Mount Intelligence, you’d think that choosing the best possible toolset would be of some importance. While you might certainly overcome a small hill even crawling barefoot, blindfolded, and with your hands tied behind your back, why in the world would you suppose that this approach could possibly apply to the single most difficult climb out there?