I played around with Coconut many years ago and my impression was that the compiler was not smart enough to be useful. The generated code had a big pile of helper functions hardcoded at the top, and the program was much slower than the equivalent plain Python.

By contrast Hy generates Python code that is very close to what you might write by hand, apart from some indirection when it comes to scoping with `let` and some variations around returning values.

Maybe Coconut has improved though, it's been a long time.