Ask HN: Best language for general AI programming?

Python for all the reasons people have mentioned here.

Tangential, but does anyone know of a playground environment where you can code (ro)bots in Python? I'm thinking of the old Robocode challenges, which were Java based, where you could write some logic and it would enter your bot in a tournament. Would be fun to do some game AI with Python like that.

Lisp family languages, IIRC, were traditional choices for “AI” when “AI” largely meant expert systems / production rules systems. But, AFAIK, while s-expression like formats remain traditional for rules expressions in such systems, the implementation languages even for those (which usually aren't called “AI” today) are often in other languages.