First of all, thank you! As for what motivates me, it's a few different things:
* The challenge of it. Lily's one of the few things that I've done where I feel really challenged, and where I can actually make a true difference in it. It gives me something to do, something that I can always be refining and thinking about.
* I -strongly- believe there is a market for this. I want to see this used in game development, used in server development, and used standalone. It's really, really fast scripting language with static typing that brings a unique blend of features that allow for terse code. I want to eventually port this to Arduino, just to say that I did it (Lily boots in 6K with 64-bit pointers, so I think it's possible).
* It's something that I can put at the top of my resume.
* I balance what I do. You might see me spend a week doing plumbing work in lexer, and the next I jump around and patch different places in emitter. I try to not stick in any one area too long. If I do a feature that's difficult and takes a long time, I balance that out with what I term "candy". Candy, in this case, being something that's more immediately visible. I added the constructor shorthand syntax shortly after doing type erasure. Type erasure took a month, and I was a little burned after that. So I balanced it out with a feature that was easier, and had a more visible effect on the language.
* Once a week, I'll go over what I've done, and sort of pat myself on the back, and also think of "Alright, X is done..." and it always goes to "So what's next week?" There's never been a "I'm done". Honestly? The first two years were the hardest, because I didn't have a product that I cared much for. These last three have been easier, because I'm excited about what I'm doing, and there's a more broad spectrum of what I can do.
* You all. No, seriously, I'm finding myself more often talking to different communities about what I've done. I talked to 4chan's /g/ last night. Sometimes I talk to different boards on Reddit, sometimes I try to talk here. I tried Slashdot once, but they didn't bother to even approve the article. Some people give crummy comments, but seeing the new stars, seeing people say they're willing to try the language, that means a lot to me. I really enjoy engaging people when it's over text about what I've done, since I'm comfortable when talking over text and I don't get RL opportunities to talk about what I do hardly ever since I don't know anyone personally RL who does coding for a living, and I'm a pretty stay-to-myself person.
The MicroPython(a python version for microcontrollers) guys are paid by the european space agency(ESA) to create a version that runs on a satellite. I think your "tag" idea for what needs garbage collection could really help them make python time deterministic(and more memory stable) which is great for a satellite and crucial for mcu's. Same for other ideas.
So i think they would appreciate talking with you about that ideas, since your languages share many similar goals.
> I -strongly- believe there is a market for this.
It's the game scripting language I never knew I wanted. I was going to roll a custom Lisp thing for a game that I'm considering, but I may as well just use Lily instead.
I've read that you're not employed as a programmer, and self taught, but designing a language seems a extremely awkward task for a newcomer. May I ask you your background in general ? you studied engineering or maths ? Don't tell me you woke up one morning and wondered about what this computer language thingy is and then implemented one in a week.
