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Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

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Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#21

Post by blumomo »

Kodiologist wrote: post #5
blumomo wrote: post #2

Congratulations! I once bought your eBook on Hy, and still today I regularly receive notifications about your book having been updated. Thank you for your steady contributions. I really want to use Hy in one my production apps one day.

The author of the e-book is a different guy, Mark Watson. He isn't involved in the development of the language.

Oh, thanks. He seemed so enthusiastic about Hy :-)

I just read through the author list on the Hy repo and had a glimpse into their blog posts. Cool stuff, great work.

Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#22

Post by cooljoseph »

I was having some difficulty figuring out how Hy actually is translated to Python (and wasn't even sure if it was compiled or interpreted). Eventually I found on Wikipedia the following: > Hy is a dialect of the Lisp programming language designed to interact with Python by translating s-expressions into Python's abstract syntax tree (AST).

Also, looking at the code on Github suggests this compiler is written in Python (see https://github.com/hylang/hy/blob/master/hy/compiler.py).

I kind of wish this was made more clear on the main website. Perhaps, instead of introducing Hy as "a Lisp dialect that's embedded in Python", introduce it as "a Lisp dialect that compiles to Python's AST". The words "embedded in Python" don't make it very clear just how it's embedded into Python. The various ways you can embed a Lisp look very different and have very different tradeoffs.

For example, off the top of my head, I could "embed" a Lisp by writing an interpreter (in C if I care about performance) and letting it be called from Python, perhaps passing in a Python list instead of a string to make it more "native". Or I could "embed" a Lisp by compiling to Python bytecode. Or I could "embed" a Lisp by translating it directly to Python source code. Etc.

Regardless, interesting project!

Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#23

Post by rcarmo »

At long last! Now I can finally clean up https://github.com/rcarmo/sushy (I've been poking at it over the years, but every time I upgraded hy portions of the syntax broke, or things would get moved in and out of the hyrule package, etc.)

By the way, Hy works really well inside https://holzschu.github.io/a-Shell_iOS on the iPad, although the syntax highlighting in vim/neovim needs to catch up to the 0.29+ releases and async.

Although I've tried using Fennel and Guile instead over the years, having access to Python libraries and ecosystem is preferable to me, and with async I can do some very nice, efficient API wrangling (doing HTTPS with fine-grained control over socket re-use and headers remains a pain in various Schemes, so I very much prefer using aiohttp)

Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#24

Post by rcarmo »

HexDecOctBin wrote: post #20

Congrats! Two questions: 1. Does it support REPL-driven development? (condition system, breakloop, etc.) 2. Is there a standalone distribution? Distributing python in itself is a hassle, ideal situation would be to simply distribute a single Hy binary that contains all dependencies within it (either statically linked or as a zip file extracted in tmp directory).

I managed to do 2, sort of, with py2app and judicious hacking. You can compile everything to byte code and use Python "single file" deployment tools.

Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#26

Post by rcarmo »

cooljoseph wrote: post #22

I was having some difficulty figuring out how Hy actually is translated to Python (and wasn't even sure if it was compiled or interpreted). Eventually I found on Wikipedia the following: > Hy is a dialect of the Lisp programming language designed to interact with Python by translating s-expressions into Python's abstract syntax tree (AST). Also, looking at the code on Github suggests this compiler is written in Pytho…

The "embed" part stems from the fact that you can mix Python and Hy in a project with bi-directional calling. Works great, because it is all Python byte code in the end.

Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#27

Post by PuercoPop »

cooljoseph wrote: post #22

I was having some difficulty figuring out how Hy actually is translated to Python (and wasn't even sure if it was compiled or interpreted). Eventually I found on Wikipedia the following: > Hy is a dialect of the Lisp programming language designed to interact with Python by translating s-expressions into Python's abstract syntax tree (AST). Also, looking at the code on Github suggests this compiler is written in Pytho…

The original hy annoucement makes it clear that they embed a Lisp by compiling with Python bytecode. You can see it in the following video about the 16:25 mark

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1vui-LupKJI

Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#29

Post by anovick »

chrisrink10 wrote: post #18
anovick wrote: post #7

Congrats! Could you compare the language with Clojure?

I haven't used Hy, but I am the maintainer of a Basilisp which also compiles to Python and aims for reasonably close compatibility with Clojure if you're interested. https://github.com/basilisp-lang/basilisp

Cool project!

Wondering how custom immutable data structures fit in with the Python ecosystem.

Particularly, I know that NumPy arrays and Pandas Series/DataFrames are the popular data structures used in research computing in Python (for Statistics, Data Science, Machine Learning etc.). These data structures afaik are mutable, however (for performance reasons), so at least the aspect of immutability from Clojure cannot be easily integrated with the Python ecosystem.

Re: Hy 1.0 – Lisp dialect for Python

#30

Post by Kodiologist »

cooljoseph wrote: post #22

I was having some difficulty figuring out how Hy actually is translated to Python (and wasn't even sure if it was compiled or interpreted). Eventually I found on Wikipedia the following: > Hy is a dialect of the Lisp programming language designed to interact with Python by translating s-expressions into Python's abstract syntax tree (AST). Also, looking at the code on Github suggests this compiler is written in Pytho…

> this compiler is written in Python

Yes, that's right. Hy is not self-hosted.

> The various ways you can embed a Lisp look very different and have very different tradeoffs.

Hy itself provides options. Typically the process is that the Hy source code becomes Python AST objects, which Python then complies and executes, but you can also translate the Python AST objects into Python source text. Or you can use Python from Hy or vice versa: https://hylang.org/hy/doc/v1.0.0/interop

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