I’ve been playing around with Parrot again lately, since it’s approaching a 1.0 release. I’m going through the tutorials for the Parrot Compiler Toolkit, and I’m quite impressed. Sure, I keep shooting myself in the foot since I don’t understand how everything interacts yet, but it does work. I like it because it makes it easy to figure out what’s really going on and how the conversion processes work, and it seems to be reasonably well documented.
One of my longer term goals is to have a suitable nice language for MUD world programming (which assumes that the programmers can’t be trusted), and I think I’d like to modify an existing language to fulfill the requirements. Of course, having almost no idea about compiler design seriously limits how much I can tweak without wreaking havoc.