Yup. The logic at the time went something like, "I want something that will be reasonably fast and scale to lots of multiple processors and runs in a tight sandbox and has been thoroughly debugged with enterprise-scale muscle behind it, and which above all is not C++, and in a few years (note: HAH!) when we start coding, Java will probably be it." There were lots of better-designed languages out there but they didn't have the promise of enterprise-scale muscle behind their implementation of things like parallelism.

Also at that time, I was thinking in terms of a much larger eventual codebase, and was much more desperate to use something that wasn't C++. Today I would say that if you can write AI at all, you can write the code parts in C, because AI is not a coding problem.

Mostly in that era there weren't any good choices, so far as I knew then. Ben Goertzel, who was trying to scale a large AI codebase, was working in a mix of C/C++ and a custom language running on top of C/C++ (I forget which), which I think he had transitioned either out of Java or something else, because nothing else was fast enough or handled parallelism correctly. Lisp, he said at that time, would have been way too slow.