I love the idea of offering your own mini-course. Teaching is by far the fastest way of cementing your knowledge of a subject. It would be great if someone could create a platform /'app store' for providing stuff like this, free or otherwise.
Check the syllabus; you create a Javascript/HTML parser and learn about syntax trees, grammars, etc. So the content will be similar to creating your own programming language.
Both of these are basically introductory Programming Languages classes (with a capital P and L, in other words the study of programming languages themselves). I'm not really sure how you could create your own language without learning about different languages.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't "How to Create Your Own Freaking Awesome Programming Language" the motivation for CoffeeScript. That alone should be enough motivation for sending your money that way.
Check out Andrej Bauer's Programming language Zoo for some simple languages implemented in OCaml. Although he focuses more on the implementation/runtime semantics than on syntax.
I like his teaching style. To get a sense for yourself check out http://nathansjslessons.appspot.com where he covers functions as values, closures, and CSP in javascript.
I dunno about you guys but I seem to spend almost all my professional time programming in javascript these days. This is perfect!
i created a programming language of sorts in javascript, it was awful to code in (stored code as strings and used eval to run everything), but it did work - it is used for creating macros on an in-house billing system and only worked under ie6 trusted (which was the mandated browser) - more modern browsers balked at the cross site scripting exploit it took advantage of, but it was pretty useful way to deploy batch scripts as a bookmark. will share if anyone dares!
You can also just fork one of the many that are out there. Makes it easier than starting from scratch (although I realize for some people that eliminates the fun part). I'm liking Sibilant a lot: http://sibilantjs.info
Scheme from Scratch - http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introdu...