py4cl2 VS hy

I... recently got that working: https://github.com/digikar99/py4cl2/tree/master/cffi - Yes, CFFI! Yes, passing CL array data by reference!

I ended up using a fair bit of matplotlib through college and with colleagues. I too don't want to use python, but I also don't like throwing away its libraries, and I'm too lazy to invest in other* plotting ecosystems. In effect, I use up using matplotlib through py4cl/2.

Note that it is not my aim to replace the python ecosystem; I think that is far too lofy a goal to be of any good. My original intention was to interoperate with python through py4cl/2 or the likes, but felt that one needs a Common Lisp library for "small" operations, while "large" operations can be offloaded to python libraries through py4cl/2.

Python: Blender and Panda3D (game engine used for Disney's Toontown way back when) are both scriptable with Python. I've been able to successfully call Panda from Py4CL2 (thanks digikar for the help with that), but I have not tried with Blender yet. I think it's doable.

While you are at it I may as well mention https://github.com/digikar99/py4cl2

If performance is absolutely not a concern, then third option is using python libraries through py4cl/2. To put it differently, if calling python from lisp is not the bottleneck, then this is a feasible option.

py4cl2 (not py4cl!) author here. From the v2.9.0 docs:

py4cl and py4cl2 represent a fairly pragmatic example of method 1, using an OS child process to communicate back and forth with your python code. Python is fairly popular and well-enabled with libraries, so you can delegate things to python that leverage those libraries.

If you can structure your code so that data de/serialization is not a bottleneck, then you could access the python libraries using py4cl/2.

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.