Bay Area Artificial Intelligence Meetup Group Message Board › What are your thoughts on Clojure and Church?

What are your thoughts on Clojure and Church? (MIT's new LISP like probabilistic language)

Juan-Manuel
Posted Mar 31, 2010 3:36 PM
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San Francisco, CA
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I've you haven't all heard or discussed there is a new probabilistic variant of Lisp known as the Church programming language (Goodman, Mansinghka, Roy, Bonawitz, & Tenenbaum, 2008). This is news to me, but I've been on the side self teaching myself Clojure a LISP spin-off that runs on the JVM and has access to all of JAVA's libraries and is built to allow the "fostering functional programming with immutable persistent data structures; and providing built-in concurrency support via software transactional memory and asynchronous agents" as the site states. I really like the concept of Clojure but I'm still quite the novice at it or functional programming. I come from a C/JAVA background.

Church paper

I wanted to know what the AI community's thoughts were on these languages, and if there is anyone with Clojure experience; how easy would it be to model Church's design?

Now according to the news article printed at MIT, this new language has shown some very interesting results.
Matthew Bailey
Posted Apr 1, 2010 9:45 AM
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San Francisco, CA
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I just read about Church, and it is exactly what I have been asking why no one has done yet (seemed like a no brainer to me). Probabalistic learning alone wasn't good enough. Rule-based systems were deemed inadequate, yet to me, the combination of the two seemed to be exactly what the next step should be. The next step should be to apply this language to some form of self-altering architecture.

But, that is just my sophomoric take on it.
Matthew Bailey
Posted Apr 2, 2010 10:41 AM
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San Francisco, CA
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For anyone wanting to read the Paper written by Goodman (et al), I have a link to the pdf.

Church: A Language for Generative Models

I think that next year when I do Lisp (Scheme) at UC, I am going to recommend (strongly and in force of numbers) that they change their curriculum of "Structure and Form of Programing Languages" from using Scheme to using Church. I am sure that it will not be long before OOP types are added to Church and then it will have combined almost every paradigm of programming there is (I suppose that welding Prolog or something like Open-Cyc or Open-Cog would be good as well, but it looks to already include some sort of primitives for doing what Cyc and/or Cog already do)
Jack Park
Posted Apr 10, 2010 4:50 PM
user 7986756
Menlo Park, CA
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Let me ask a naive question here, having downloaded the church paper, the clojure build, and bought the clojure book. What are the odds of something like clojure--a java system--for church? Essentially, how soon till I can drop church alongside clojure in my java toolbox?

Thanks, Jack
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