Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised May 29, 2026

Church (programming language)

Church refers to both a family of LISP-like probabilistic programming languages for specifying arbitrary probabilistic programs, as well as a set of algorithms for performing probabilistic inference in the generative models those programs define. Church was originally developed at MIT, primarily in the computational cognitive science group, run by Joshua Tenenbaum. Several different inference algorithms and concrete languages are in existence, including Bher, MIT-Church, Cosh, Venture, and Anglican.

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May 29, 2026
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Church refers to both a family of LISP-like probabilistic programming languages1 for specifying arbitrary probabilistic programs, as well as a set of algorithms for performing probabilistic inference in the generative models those programs define. Church was originally developed at MIT, primarily in the computational cognitive science group, run by Joshua Tenenbaum.2 Several different inference algorithms and concrete languages are in existence, including Bher, MIT-Church, Cosh, Venture, and Anglican.

References

References

  1. "Probabilistic Programming wiki". Archived from the original on 2008-11-18. Retrieved 2020-07-22.
  2. Goodman, Noah; Mansinghka, Vikash; Roy, Daniel; Bonawitz, Keith; Tenenbaum, Joshua (2008). "Church: a language for generative models" (PDF). Proc. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence.