I too preferred church, though I understand why the authors of dippl chose a more popular language (javascript) for their book. Church (a dialect of Scheme, whi

I too preferred church, though I understand why the authors of dippl chose a more popular language (javascript) for their book. Church (a dialect of Scheme, which is a dialect of Lisp) also ties probabilistic programming back to its intellectual roots in McCarthy's amb operator [1]. That said, you can get pretty far with probabilistic programming in any language with decent monad support [2]. I did most of my probabilistic programming work in Scala. (You lose the ability to do really fancy inference if you go the monad route, as you can't analyze the program structure, but a lot of the time, this is fine.) [1] http://community.schemewiki.org/?amb http://community.schemewiki.org/?amb [2] http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/pdf/SciGhaGor15.pdf http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/pub/pdf/SciGhaGor15.pdf