A word of advise - forget about parsing for now. It's unimportant anyway and obscures the whole thing beyond recognition.
Start by designing embedded DSLs on top of sufficiently expressive languages (i.e., any language with compile-time macros), it will give you enough of understanding of how compilers work. From there you can move to standalone compilers and, finally, if you ever need to (most often it's not necessary), to the syntax front-ends.
Start by designing embedded DSLs on top of sufficiently expressive languages (i.e., any language with compile-time macros), it will give you enough of understanding of how compilers work. From there you can move to standalone compilers and, finally, if you ever need to (most often it's not necessary), to the syntax front-ends.