OK, fair points. Perhaps think that came across a bit more negative than I intended it to. I think there's a lot of value (and a lot of buy-in) for probabilist

OK, fair points. Perhaps think that came across a bit more negative than I intended it to. I think there's a lot of value (and a lot of buy-in) for probabilistic modelling languages, which impose some constraints in order to get efficient inference, which help you meet those constraints and don't provide a false promise of generality. And tonnes of value in research which looks for nice unifying formalisms to enable this sort of thing. Also in nice formalisms for inference in general, so perhaps that will be a useful side-effect of this work. It's the idea of full-blown probabilistic programming, where you have unconstrained turing-complete non-deterministic programming language and inference just works, where I've seen a bit more in the way of healthy skepticism. Of the "this will be nice if it ever arrives, but in the meantime I'll be getting on with doing statistics, which it doesn't obviate the need for". Similar to a computer scientist and the ultimate "sufficiently smart" compiler I suppose.