@adrianh suggests looking more at Parrot Compiler Toolkit ... which is very cool.

I'm finding that language design is hard. Not just the implementation part (although that's hard too) ... but just figuring out how to make a syntax that allows all the things you'd expect to be done in an elegant way.

I'm starting to appreciate how clever certain common design patterns are in language design, and how hard it is to deviate from them. More on this soon ...