CoffeeScript is hardly "exotic", as other comments on this post mention. But, if you want to try playing around with a mini programming language of your own, it

CoffeeScript is hardly "exotic", as other comments on this post mention. But, if you want to try playing around with a mini programming language of your own, it could serve as a good starting point -- especially if you want to make something that runs in the browser. It's one thing if you want to deal with integer representations and memory allocation, and quite another to want to experiment with language design, grammars and object models (and be playing with <canvas> animations tomorrow). The CoffeeScript codebase is only 2,200 lines of code in toto, and it's all annotated to help you get started and make sense of things. http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs/scope.html http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs... I'll second the motion for you to write your own thing.