Most of the vision research and connectionist research that was hot in the mid-80's was in C, anyway. Today, there are still some aspects of programming that distinguish the AI programmer and, hence, inform the choice of language. The AI programmer tends to work with either a lot of data, a lot of algorithm, or a lot of cycles. If it's data, it's probably string data, and it's probably being transformed in such a way that database languages are not helpful. If it's a lot of cycles, then there's probably some kind of search or heuristic approach to a computationally hard problem that is being solved.
Search tends to be like that.
A 100,000-times faster processer might permit a chess program to look at two moves more, but a few hundred lines of code might permit it to look six moves deeper. We used to talk about minimizing programming time instead of minimizing run time. Perhaps even better would be to talk about the percentage of times that you program your idea when you have one. AI is a tool that permits the person who has theories about behavior to make them precise and to test them. Trying to turn a theory into a program was the best way to determine what details the theory had not provided, and ultimately, to decide whether the theory was any good.