> What is probabilistic programming actually useful for? You can think of a probabilistic programming language as a set of building blocks for building statist

> What is probabilistic programming actually useful for? You can think of a probabilistic programming language as a set of building blocks for building statistical models. In the olden days, people used very simple frequentist models based on standard reference distributions like the normal, Student's t, chi2, etc. The models were simple because the computational capabilities were limited. In modern days, thanks to widespread compute and the inference algorithms, you can "fit" a much wider class of models, so researchers now tend to build bespoke models adapted for each particular application they are interested in. Probabilistic programming language are used to build those "custom" models.