clojerl VS hy

Basically, you take a programming language and make it work on a platform that meant to be programmed using a different PL. Clojure is hosted by design - it's not Java, but can be used to program for JVM. It ain't Javascript, but can be used to target nodejs and browser; not an [official] CLR language, but you can write .Net programs. You can use Clojure to make Flutter apps with ClojureDart. You can integrate Python into Clojure with libpython-clj. Or write Clojure to target Erlang/OTP; or Rust; or R; There's even a clojure-like language for Lua - Fennel.

There's something about Clojure people like so much, they want it to work atop any platform.

https://github.com/Tensegritics/ClojureDart

https://github.com/clj-python/libpython-clj

https://github.com/clojerl/clojerl

https://github.com/clojure-rs/ClojureRS

https://github.com/scicloj/clojisr

https://fennel-lang.org

But there are also unofficial implementations—i.e. not JVM, JS, .NET—of Clojure for other host environments, e.g. Clojerl. And of course nearly everything /u/borkdude touches interops with something in some way.

Tail call optimization/elimination isn't a property of functional languages - there are tons of non-functional languages with it, like Lua or even C, when compiled with -O3, to name a few. Besides, Clojure is a hosted language, so it shares the platform characteristics, and recur is a language-way of providing a construct for tail call looping. Clojure on BEAM for example, supports tail call elimination, because BEAM does. And Beam is a quite functional environment ;)

Clojerl: an implementation for the Erlang VM. The reader conditional is :clje.

There's also an unofficial BEAM VM implementation

Not exactly the same (doesn't embed into the source like this did), but I believe Hylang[0] is the best Lisp package available for modern Python.

[0] https://github.com/hylang/hy

Isn't that a bit what hy (https://hylang.org/) tries to do ? AIUI it is a lisp interacting directly with the AST of Python, allowing seamless interop: Python modules can be used from hy and vice versa, everything is transparent.

I’ve been keeping loose tabs on this and Hy[1] for a while, but I’ve had some trouble figuring out the major differences between them and the use-cases for either. Would love to see an in-depth comparison in the form of a blog post sometime (though maybe the answer here is to do the research and write one up myself).

1: https://hylang.org

“Python is for scientists. Lisp is for engineers.”

Then what does that make Hy language?

https://hylang.org/

Re Languages with lots of example code and LLM’s

With translators or things like Hy lang, one could get the LLM’s to solve your problem in Python before converting it to another form. Then, you just need a translator. If lacking one, it’s easy to translate by hand.

The practicality of this concept will probably vary by use case. My experiments had GPT doing sketching, implementations, boilerplate, and even porting Python to Rust. A legally-clear LLM trained on multiple languages could probably be fine-tuned to do Python to LISP conversions. If not, Hy might be a stepping stone, too.

You could say so: I've been maintaining the compiler since 2016 ;). Infinitesimal Quest 2 + ε (SQ) exists more to advance Hy than for its own sake.

If you are using Python - you might find Hylang (https://hylang.org) interesting.