I looked up NEST, written in C++ with Python. What, no LISP?
When I hear AI being discussed LISP comes up fairly often. In the book "Meta Maths: The Quest for Omega" by Greg Chaitin, he mentions that Kurt Godel's work had a notation that was uncannily similar to LISP code. On the other paw he compares Turing's idea of code as something more akin to machine code.
Historically speaking, Lisp was the de-facto language of AI for quite a bit of time. That's only been the case for classical AI research, however. People working on AI and machine learning these days aren't necessarily all working in Lisp -- they're usually working in high-performance languages, or in interpreted languages with high-performance libraries (e.g. Python plus numpy or scipy or what have you).
Greg says he wrote his first LISP interpreter in FORTRAN, around the early 1970's. I was thinking that NEST might have code that emulates certain properties of LISP, I've heard of many LISP interpreters being written in other languages over the ages.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6157157
And the Riken Lab press release
http://www.riken.jp/en/pr/press/2013/20130802_1/
This is a link to the poster presentation. There does not seem to be a full paper associated with this research yet.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/14/S1/P163
The NEST simulator (The researchers Morrison and Diesman are integral people on this project):
http://www.nest-initiative.org/index.php/Software:About_NEST