[gruseom]

(jacquesm beat me to it, but I'm sure you can use more than one reply.)

Given your relationship to programming as you describe it, I am quite sure that you can break out of this job. So please don't feel depressed! Just steel yourself to work damn hard on other stuff, no matter how tired or bummed you are from work, and don't stop until you get somewhere you want to be.

Working on open-source projects is a great way to develop credibility. A huge advantage of this approach is that you build credibility with the right crowd - the ones who find the same things cool and interesting that you do. If I were you I'd work backwards from the kinds of companies I'd like to hire me and try to make substantial contributions to open-source software that such companies use. Either that or I'd make cool new library on top of one.

Working on a personal language is less likely, I think, to be externally impressive. Most people's reaction to that will be "yawn", unless you're able to demonstrate something fundamentally new about it, and even then there is a high barrier to convincing anybody. You'd be better off finding open-source implementations of some known language to work on. (I'm talking, strictly, about using it as a bridge to paid work. Obviously you feel passionately enough to make it worth doing in its own right, but that's a separate question.)

[yacoder]

Thank you. The positive encouragement of HNers means a lot to me.

I think a consensus is emerging that putting the language project aside for a while to focus on OSS would be a good idea.

[jacquesm]

What are your skills ? (programming languages and so on ?)

[yacoder]

currently, mostly C#, SQL, F# and some scheme. Most of my experience (and entirely professionally) is on the MS stack, though I run linux at home.

[jacquesm]

Ok. I see ErrantX has already made you an offer, nice to see HN'ers help out other HN'ers!

I'll be running a pretty weird experiment in a few weeks, I'm not yet ready to explain it in public because I'm still tweaking the idea and I don't want to limit myself by nailing it down, if you are interested drop me an email (email in my profile).