I spent some time with Hy about a year back, and that is approximately the impression I brought away. In order to maintain good interop with Python, they had to make a lot of compromises about how things work in Hy, relative to what a Lisper might expect. The most striking example I can think of offhand is that `let` had to get banished from the standard library: https://github.com/hylang/hy/issues/844

That said, Hy is still a nice language, and very well thought out. It's just that billing it as a lisp dialect for Python (as the project's website does) might lead to some false expectations. That GH thread I linked above is a great example of this. There's a lot of good, careful thought going into the design of the language. But it also has this sentence in the opening comment: "Hy is not Clojure, nor Common Lisp, but homoiconic Python." If you're interested in a Python variant with good macro system, this is it.

(Also, I'm not sure it necessarily disqualifies Hy from being a lisp. There are too many different conflicting opinions about the definition of 'lisp' for me to want to say either way, and, while a lot of good and insightful things have been said on the subject, I've personally always found that particular argument to be rather boring.)

Hy does have a let macro now, but you have to (require) it before it works: https://docs.hylang.org/en/master/api.html#module-hy.contrib...