You're right that writing a complete language like Java or Python is not a small task, but that's because these languages have redundant ways of doing the same

You're right that writing a complete language like Java or Python is not a small task, but that's because these languages have redundant ways of doing the same thing. If you simplify them be eliminating redundancy while retaining power, you'll have a much simpler implementation task. Here's a language I designed for this: https://kartick-log.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-arent-there-simple-programming.html https://kartick-log.blogspot.com/2016/04/why-arent-there-sim... If you want to learn language implementation rather than design, you can implement this language as is. Another option is to build a VM, that accepts as input byte in a text (not binary) form. Less efficient, but easier to implement, and you can write your bytecode by hand instead of also building a compiler to do so. Like object-oriented assembly language, if you will. If you're interested, I'll scan and share my dissertation report with you. You can also implement a domain-specific language. Did you, in the past, feel that a task you were doing would be simpler if there was a custom language for it? If so, maybe you can try building that DSL and then using that to make your main task easier.