[dtolpin]

I am the author of the most of current Anglican code base. Anglican's name indeed comes from the Church of England, Church being the name of an influential probabilistic programming language https://cocolab.stanford.edu/papers/GoodmanEtAl2008-Uncertai... . Frank Wood, the inventor of Anglican, moved to Oxford from the US and the name reflects the move.

Clojure was chosen because it was a modern lisp which was apparently easy to deploy (leveraging the JVM). That choice was given to me (I learned Clojure to join, but new Common Lisp well before). Original Anglican syntax was Scheme-like, for Church compatibility, but we switched to Clojure syntax later.

Anglican has been a platform for a number of research projects (and some practical applications). Now Anglican is in dire need of new maintainers or it will stagnate (I am not working on Anglican code base anymore, doing other things: http://infergo.org among others). One low-hanging fruit which unfortunately refuses to fall is automatic differentiation.