That&#x27;s a fair point. It&#x27;s never easy and I had that rough experience, too. I mean, I wasn&#x27;t a real expert on these things so mine was a reimplementation of existing work but still hard.<p>Curious, what was your language&#x27;s interesting properties?<p>&quot;I guess I am reluctant to realize how much easier it would have been with a lisp.&quot;<p>It might help if you see a modern example. The recent language impressing me the most with its features is Julia:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;julialang.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;julialang.org&#x2F;</a><p>Wondering aloud about how they pulled all that off, esp macro&#x27;s, led someone here to tell me it&#x27;s actually femtolisp internally:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;JeffBezanson&#x2F;femtolisp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;JeffBezanson&#x2F;femtolisp</a><p>So, they <i>appear</i> to have built a simple LISP, then used it to incrementally build a compiler for a complex language. They just represent the syntax internally in a LISP form and work with it from there. Don&#x27;t know much more than that but it shows the power of the concept.<p>Better demo is the one below as it goes step-by-step in stages. One commenter (Orion63) pointed out the author was re-using the proven cheat: &quot;build a LISP, do it all in LISP, profit.&quot; Haha. I&#x27;ve considered duplicating that work with different language options.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9699065" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9699065</a>