I think many people underestimate how easy it is to get started writing a language. It is a bit like improvising music: it's just one note followed by another note followed by another. Almost any intermediate level programmer can write a program that parses a hello, world program and translates it into the language they already know. Once you have hello, world, you add features. Eventually you realize you made mistakes in your initial design and start over but your second design will be better than the first because of the knowledge that you now have. After enough iterations, you will have a good language that you like (even though it won't be everyone's cup of tea).
Very true. Working on a proglang is more like running a marathon than a 100 meters.
Another thing that would surprise people is that how few complex data structures or subtil algorithms are required. For example in styx-lang, my little retard baby language, there is literaly no binary searches, no sorting, no hash map, no hash sets, yet it is still fast because actually a compiler most of the time only has to deal with very small vectors (5 parameters, 10 enum members, 15 statements in a body, etc.)
Yeah, the high stakes are part of the thrill, because it's oh so easy to paint yourself into enough of a corner to have to throw the whole thing away and start over.
