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by Kodiologist 640 days ago
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.
1 comments

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.