I've looked at the Flare docs and been similarly unimpressed. Most of that is hindsight bias - knowing that the project remained (that I'm aware of) at the vaporware stage without delivering an actual language. Some of the proposed language features are indeed attractive; the existing language that most closely resembles it is Javascript, which shares with LambdaMOO (mentioned in the Flare docs) the interesting feature of prototype inheritance ("parenting"). Part of the negative impression comes from the docs being a catalog of proposed features, without a clear explanation of how each of those features participates in a coherent whole; it comes across as a "kitchen sink" approach to language design. Using XML as an underlying representation scheme being the most grating instance. The docs are long on how great Flare will be but short on programs written in Flare itself illustrating how and why the things you can do with Flare would be compelling to a programmer with a particular kind of problem to solve. To give you an idea of my qualifications (or lack thereof) for evaluating such an effort: I'm an autodidact; I've never designed a new language, but I have fair implementation experience. I've written a LambdaMOO compiler targeting the Java VM as part of a commercial project (shipped), and attempted writing a Java VM in Java (never shipped, impratical without also writing a JIT, but quite instructive). That was back in 1998. These projects required learning quite a bit about language design and implementation. It's harder to comment on Eliezer's other accomplishments - I'm rather impressed by the whole conceptual framework of FAI and CEV but it's the kind of thing to be judged by the detailed drudge work required to make it all work afterward, rather than by the grand vision itself. I'm impressed (you have to be) with the AI box experiments.