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Try Hy

by proppy on 11/9/13, 12:41 AM with 64 comments

• by ninetax on 11/9/13, 12:58 AM

  It's a dialect of LISP that's compiled down to Python AST IICR.

  Here's more information: http://docs.hylang.org/en/latest/tutorial.html

• by paultag on 11/9/13, 3:20 AM

  Well done! If anyone wants to learn more:

  http://hylang.org/

  http://github.com/hylang

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulekCWvDFVI

  and a quick 5 minute lightning talk:

  http://youtu.be/1vui-LupKJI?t=16m13s

  (Creator here)

  Hack on!

• by agentultra on 11/9/13, 1:54 AM

  I did a little presentation on Hy at Pycon Canada earlier this year [1].

  Hy has come a ways since then even. Shortly after that talk we added succinct syntax aliases for QUOTE and QUASIQUOTE. And we added a nice clojure-inspired core library.

  It's a cool little language. Fun to hack on. You could learn a few things if you do. And I do hope that we can start help creating documentation for the Python AST module via this project.

  [1] http://pyvideo.org/video/2328/hy-a-lisp-that-compiles-to-pyt...

• by mkramlich on 11/9/13, 1:14 AM

  A+ for presentation

• by anaphor on 11/9/13, 1:22 AM

  So it just desugars into Python? I see there is a section in the documentation for macros, but there's nothing there. Does it support AST macros right now? I thought of doing something similar to this except doing some kind of static or gradual typing (that would be a larger project though).

• by zaph0d on 11/9/13, 9:24 AM

  Very nice. Surface syntax (and some semantics like interop) seem to be heavily inspired by Clojure :-)

• by girvo on 11/9/13, 9:17 AM

  Hy is neat. I love Lisps that "compile" or are embedable within host scripting languages.

  My favourite one to hack on (owing to my PHP ability) is Pharen[0]. Very neat little Lisp that compiles down to PHP, which is very fun to play with. I highly suggest giving Hy a go if you're a Pythonista, as you can learn a lot about programming in general by seeing how these sorts of languages map to the host. Very fun to hack on, too!

  [0]: http://scriptor.github.io/pharen/

• by dmoney on 11/9/13, 7:35 AM

  To quote Dark Helmet, "What the hell am I looking at?"

• by vezzy-fnord on 11/9/13, 1:05 AM

  Not bad. Could be a very useful tool to teach Python programmers Lisp, although I don't think Python benefits much from converting its syntax to sexprs.

• by nlake44 on 11/9/13, 2:54 AM

  Source: https://github.com/hylang/tryhy

• by andrelaszlo on 11/9/13, 7:47 PM

  Apparently without TCO :(

      File "<input>", line 1, in fac
      File "<input>", line 1, in fac
      File "<input>", line 1, in fac
      RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded
      =>

• by mattholtom on 11/9/13, 4:00 AM

  Heh, recognized reverse polish notation right away. One of the companies I interviewed at last year had me program an RPN calculator fed by CSV spreadsheets. Weirdest thing I've made to date by a pretty wide margin.

• by jackhammons on 11/9/13, 1:23 AM

  Incredible implementation.

• by petercooper on 11/9/13, 11:19 AM

  What blew my mind is this actually worked on my iPod Touch and brought up the keyboard. Usually "dynamic" JavaScript keyboards or games totally fail on there..

• by hcarvalhoalves on 11/9/13, 2:06 AM

  Excellent. I thought what a LISP on top of the Python runtime would be (like Clojure + JVM), didn't knew this existed already.

• by a3_nm on 11/9/13, 9:49 AM

  "(defun f x (x))" gives a Python stack trace.

• by Sunlis on 11/9/13, 4:04 AM

  Finally my knowledge of Scheme comes in handy!

• by talles on 11/9/13, 3:43 AM

  Love at first sight with the presentation

• by d0m on 11/9/13, 3:31 AM

  I think this is fucking amazing.

• by basyt on 11/9/13, 4:22 AM

  effin' finally. now to do some serious lisping!

• by derp_dogg on 11/9/13, 5:42 AM

  where's cons?

• by jbeja on 11/9/13, 5:01 AM

  This could be the next big thing.

• by jbeja on 11/9/13, 3:24 AM

  Is Python really that awesome?

• by ravestar on 11/9/13, 1:22 AM

  []+1 = [] 1

  []+[] -> error ...