[mcejp]

I would like to make the observation that as Hy matured over the years, instead of accumulating syntactic sugar and special cases to grow more Lispy, less Pythony, it seems to have generally gone the opposite way. That is, becoming a thinner syntactic abstraction of Python's feature set, focusing on the essentials that cannot be emulated in any other way (macros)

A few examples from recent releases:

- "match" is just native Python "match" -- it doesn't even polyfill for pre-3.10 Python versions (in the TypeScript world this would be unthinkable)

- "foo?" used to mangle to "is_foo" as a special case, but this has been removed

- "hy.eval" has been overhauled to be more like Python's "eval"

- nice-to-have but non-essential utilities ("unless") get often pushed out into the Hyrule package

For me this direction was counter-intuitive at first, but it has some very nice outcomes; for one, it simplifies the learning curve when coming over to Hy from Python, and it makes it easier to consistently interact with Python packages (arguably the main reason to use Python in the first place!)

Or maybe it's just a matter of simplyfing maintenance of the language; IIRC, "let" took like 4 attempts to get right :)

In any case, congratulations on this great milestone!

[Kodiologist]

Yeah, at a certain point I realized that both the maintenance and the use of the language became much slicker if unnecessary deviations from Python were minimized. After all, when I'm writing Hy code, I'm usually spending a lot more time referring to the documentation of Python or third-party Python libraries than the documentation of Hy. I felt there were a number of ways Python could be improved upon, but e.g. the old feature that let you spell `True` as `true` in deference to Clojure was just a needless complication.

[mcejp]

It is true that Hy really shines in those cases where it adopts an existing Python feature and adds meaningful quality-of-life improvements: anonymous functions without limitations; multiple iteration in for-loops; relaxed character set for identifiers. Things that seem completely obvious, once you have them.

It also demonstrates that elegance in a Lisp-on-Python is reached in a very different way than elegance in a stand-alone language, since it becomes an art of making the best out of what is already there.