mal VS hy

>Would be interesting to see how the interpreter works actually...

It's quite easy to see, there are interpeters for Lisp in like 20 lines or so.

Here's a good one:

https://norvig.com/lispy.html

(It has the full code in a link towards the bottom)

There's also this:

https://github.com/kanaka/mal

Here is one implementation of a lisp (mal specifically) in matlab: https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/dcf8f4d7b9cf7b858850a04a0...

Only 260 lines of code, pretty concise :)

have a look at the crafting interpreters book, plus make a lisp (lisp is a great first language to make a compiler/interpreter for, just google "lisp compiler/interpreter" and you'll find lots of resources)

If you're really okay with the limitations of a tree-walk interpreter, you might want to check out MAL, which will teach you how to write a tree-walk interpreter for a LISP. The code for MAL has been translated to most popular languages, so you can work through the creation of an interpreter in the language of your choice. JLox would give you a bit more detail and a more complex language, but I'm not convinced that it's all that important.

Write a small programming language (lisp (https://github.com/kanaka/mal) or brainfuck) in C++ to learn the syntax more. This will teach you a lot about programming languages in general.

So I started some hobbyist game dev using Unity and realised that the full process of making a game has dependencies on a mass of lower-level skills including lighting virtual environments. As a hobbyist photographer I could see some useful analogies from lighting studios and other scenes

So I pivoted, and eventually made money, not from selling a game, but from developing tutorials about digital lighting. I was also able to contribute to a project at work that was making a product based on commercial games engine, not by actually coding it, but by helping to better estimate the costs of the asset generation required.

Coding Unity object scripts in C# also got me back into programming, and I went on to successfully build a self-hosting lisp interpreter following the Make a Lisp guidelines [0].

[0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md

Hijacking the top comment to add https://buildyourownlisp.com and https://github.com/kanaka/mal

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.