Absolutely. Two languages that anybody who wants to truly understand computing, programming languages, and compilers are Lisp and Forth. - Lisp is a fundament

Absolutely. Two languages that anybody who wants to truly understand computing, programming languages, and compilers are Lisp and Forth. - Lisp is a fundamental, extensible, simple, unbounded AST system (and brings in interesting lambda calculus). - Forth is a fundamental, extensible, simple, unbounded expression evaluator. From there, the world is yours. (Note I use "simple" in Rich Hickey's sense of simple vs easy)