Yesterday, I wrote about John Kitchin’s post on Hy, a Lisp dialect that essentially compiles to Python allowing you to write in Lisp while still having access to the Python RTL. Kitchin has published a new post describing his second day with Hy.
You can feel his excitement as he writes about experimenting with the language and seeing what it can do. As in the first post, he gives several examples including a first attempt at an Elisp macro that allows you to embed Hy in Elisp. As Kitchin notes, the language is still new and evolving so it’s apt to get better and better over time.
In the mean time, there are already resources for it. Emacs, of course, has a major mode for it that provides syntax highlighting and a REPL and abo-abo has added support for it to his lispy package. There’s also a survival guide and, of course, it’s on twitter.
I don’t really have a need for the Python RTL but I am, nevertheless, really excited to see how this all works out. I used to use Python a lot until I moved on to Lisp. Perhaps Hy will entice me to return to Python for at least some tasks.
Once again, thanks to Karl Voit for the pointer.