It's been quite a ride for the past 9 or 10 years (depending on
which cvs commit is deemed to be my first contribution). I've
gone from making trivial typo corrections, to organizing a
directory of snippets, to reorganizing the whole documentation, to
recruiting+training 20 doc editors over a single year, to building
the binaries, and finally to trying to organize the team of
developers. Over that time I've studied or worked at 5 different
university on 3 continents. But nothing lasts forever; the time
has come to leave.
For most of 2012 I haven't been doing much with LilyPond, and in
the past few weeks I've been doing even less -- but I find that I
don't miss it. I've made some good friends while working on
LilyPond, and Waltrop was great. I was really fired up about
LilyPond when I left. But sadly the warm feelings from that
meeting vanished rather quickly, and I was left feeling even more
jaded than I had earlier in the year.
Ultimately, I haven't used lilypond for my own music since 2004.
I was hoping that I could get fired up about my old pieces if I
could create a final version with a nice stable syntax, but that
hasn't happened. After I'm finished my phd, I'll do the thing
which every computer science student should do at least once in
their life: I'll make my own language. I'm not comfortable with
the level of abstractions that lilypond offers. Just like
different programming languages make it easier (or harder) to
write certain types of programs, a different sheet music language
would make it easier to express the type of music that I write.
I'll write a python script which transforms a text file into a .ly
file. There's a number of things which can be done with text
manipulation which will allow me to write music in a simpler
fashion. I'll make the resulting script available under a Free
license, of course, but the most important thing is that I'll be
"scratching an itch" as the saying goes.