[nerdponx]

Why not? I think lisps could use a visibility boost in the various data sciences. Also probabilistic programming tends to be highly declarative, which works well in a language family where "code is data" is a core philosophy.

At first glance, maybe Common Lisp would have made more sense. As far as I'm aware, the CFFI is pretty good, which means you can interact with other machine learning code that is largely written in C under the hood.

That said, there is a mature machine learning ecosystem for the JVM, not to mention the prospect of running massive probabilistic models on Yarn or Spark.

By the way, there are many probabilistic programming languages in addition to PyMC3. There are Stan, Edward, Pyro (fairly new), and even the venerable BUGS/JAGS.

[dtolpin]

One advantage of Clojure compared to Common Lisp is very well implemented parallelism and corresponding functional data structures. Something which is hard to find for Common Lisp implementations.