Definitely, I wish I could upvote that more. That said, writing a programming language sounds a little daunting if you've never been introduced. So here's my r

Definitely, I wish I could upvote that more. That said, writing a programming language sounds a little daunting if you've never been introduced. So here's my recommendation: Work your way through at least the first half of Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation by Shriram Krishnamurthi (free online http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/ http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/). Probably the most influential book of my entire CS degree, not too difficult once you get used to Scheme, and incredibly rewarding (and fun!). Your experience is mostly OO and procedural. Let's round it out with the functional cannon: In the first half of PLAI you implement the crown jewels of the paradigm: first-class functions, both with dynamic and static scope (aka closures), lazy evaluation ala Haskell, true language-supported continuations, recursion (the Y combinator is in there), mutable vs. immutable variables and more. The implementation language is Scheme, which is really really easy to grasp the basics of quickly. So as a side effect you will learn an interesting esoteric language just as you wanted. I would think any competent programmer could learn enough Scheme to work through PLAI in under 2 days. Basic Scheme is kinda like "lisp light" compared to CL/Clojure, so it's a great way to start.