I've meant to look at Hy since Paul Tagliamonte started to talk to me about it, but never took a chance until now. Yesterday, Paul indicated it was a good time for me to start looking at it, so I spent a few hours playing.
But what's Hy?
Python is very nice: it has a great community and a wide range of useful libraries. But let's face it, it misses a great language.
Hy is an implementation of a Lisp on top of Python.
Technically, Hy is built directly with a custom made parser (for now) which then translates expressions using the Python AST module to generate code, which is then run by Python. Therefore, it shares the same properties as Python, and is a Lisp-1 (i.e. with a single namespace for symbols and functions).
If you're interested to listen Paul talking about Hy during last PyCon US, I recommend watching his lightning talk. As the name implies, it's only a few minutes long.
Does it work?
I've been cloning the code and played around a bit with Hy. And to my greatest surprise and pleasure, it works quite well. You can imagine writing Python from there easily. Part of the syntax smells like Clojure's, which looks like a good thing since they're playing in the same area.
You can try a Hy REPL in your Web browser if you want.
Here's what some code look like:
(import requests) (setv req (requests.get "")) (if (= req.status_code 200) (for (kv (.iteritems req.headers)) (print kv)) (throw (Exception "Wrong status code")))
This code would ouput:
('date', 'Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:09:23 GMT') ('connection', 'keep-alive') ('content-encoding', 'gzip') ('transfer-encoding', 'chunked') ('content-type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8') ('server', 'nginx/1.2.6')
As you can see, it's really simple to write Lispy code that really uses Python idioms.
There's obviously still a lots of missing features in Hy. The language if far from complete and many parts are moving, but it's really promising, and Paul's doing a great job implementing every idea.
I actually started to hack a bit on Hy, and will try to continue to do so, since I'm really eager to learn a bit more about both Lisp and Python internals in the process. I've already send a few patches on small bugs I've encountered, and proposed a few ideas. It's really exciting to be able to influence early a language design that I'll love to use! Being a recent fan of Common Lisp, I tend to grab the good stuff from it to add them into Hy.