Designing a programming language is something I've found very interesting for the past few years now, but this is the one area of programming that really still eludes me and seems unapproachable. I've been through Understanding Computation, but at a certain point I just no longer understood what the hell was going on I was just typing in the examples.

I have the Principles of Compiler Design book and I've made a run at that a couple of times, but it seems to theoretical for me to do anything useful with it.

I've been thinking about taking a go at creating something with ANTLR alone with the books The Definitive ANTLR 4 Reference and Language Implementation Patterns, but I'm not sure if I'll have much more luck there.

If anyone knows of a better path to get from here (can't design my own language) to there (clarity and understanding) I would love to hear your ideas.

I'm not trying to create the next Rust, JavaScript, etc... I just believe that being able to implement my own language would give me a deeper understanding. In fact I'm very much interested in the idea of reimplementing an interpreter or compiler for languages I already work with as a way of learning this rather than trying to create something new.