Author here. That's roughly what I was shooting for. Python was a big inspiration early on in the design, and later on some functional concepts were put into the mix. I found them and liked them too much to pass up on.

One advantage of Lily not mentioned (with regard to typing), is that the type-checking is very fast. One of the reasons I made Lily interpreted and homebrewed all the parts was because as much as I like static typing, it's often slow. Slow static typing, I think, diminishes some of the value of it since you're still waiting but in a different way.