[dbwest]

From the Flare website

"4.1: Why is the Singularity Institute interested in Flare?

"AI has always been one of the traditional drivers of programming language advances, although usually for the wrong reasons. We don't think AI is so simplistic that the thought processes have anything to do with the idioms of the underlying programming language, but we also think that current programming tools are simply inadequate. It would be really hard to code an AI in a non-object-oriented language and it probably won't be easy to build AI in a non-annotative language either. Flare, an extensible language easily modifiable by Flare programs, will let us write more powerful tools, and will let the AI introspect and tinker with its own source code, without our needing to become compiler and interpreter specialists."

"If there's no production-quality Flare language by the time the Singularity Institute begins writing code on the AI project, as seems likely, then we'll probably be forced to write pseudo-Flare programs in Python, at least for the prototype. But we won't have to like it, and we'll still want to switch to Flare as soon as possible."

The Singularity Institute has embarked on a long-term quest to develop real AI. They don't want to stop there, either; they want to develop recursively self-improving AI, Friendly AI, and transhuman AI. The Singularity - the technological creation of greater-than-human intelligence - is a quest of such mind-boggling importance and earthshaking impact that our words cannot even begin to describe it. (You should go read their website.) Even if you've never heard of the Singularity Institute and you're getting involved in Flare solely because you love annotative programming, we still hope that you get a warm fuzzy feeling from helping to bring about a swifter and safer Singularity. "