As much as I love the concept probabilistic programming, the name makes me cringe every time I hear it. It’s verbose, doesn’t abbreviate well and borders on bei

As much as I love the concept probabilistic programming, the name makes me cringe every time I hear it. It’s verbose, doesn’t abbreviate well and borders on being a tongue twister. More substantially, the name suggests that the act of programming itself is probabilistic (a real but distinct phenomenom :) ) Worse, rather than highlighting the key value proposition: automated inference, the name suggests a focus on the development of probabilistic programs. Perhaps, as a result, many introductions to probabilistic programming concern themselves almost exclusively on the comparatively trivial task of expressing models as algorithms while blissfully ignoring the thorny problem of inference. I suggest talking about “automated inference” instead. It rolls off the tongue much more easily, and, more importantly, gets to the heart of the matter.