hy VS ferret

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.

Seems like there has been no development since 2020 - https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret

The whole of ferret's source code is in a single org-mode file, following the literate programming style: https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret/blob/master/ferret.org

fyi there's some middle ground via ferret if you want to mix the two in the future. I think janet lang is more full featured, borrowing ideas from clojure while targeting simple embedding alongside c.

Another commenter already mentioned Gambit Scheme. That provides for inline C and therefore very easy interop with external libraries. It still has a runtime and GC though - those might pose a problem depending on your platform and task.

Ferret (https://github.com/nakkaya/ferret) and Carp (https://github.com/carp-lang/Carp) are both Lisp-like low level languages. Both seem to be fairly experimental in nature though.

> anything but C

Taking you literally, Rust and D can both compile for bare metal. D in particular has a "Better C" subset. (https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html)

In the same vein, Terra is a C like language (manual memory management) that you metaprogram with Lua. (https://github.com/terralang/terra)

Taking you very literally, Forth is also an option.

Impressive. Wonder how the performance in Emacs will be with a file this big... org source file