I disagree. Parsers are tedious to write and obscure corner cases crop up over the course of development that make us completely change our approach to parsing

I disagree. Parsers are tedious to write and obscure corner cases crop up over the course of development that make us completely change our approach to parsing or the grammar. You have to be pretty expert to get the grammar and parsing to work right the first time. Type inference is tough, but it’s not difficult the way writing a parser is. Codegen (suboptimal but functional) is even easier. But yeah, write the vertical slice and implement a print builtin are good tips.