I was curious about something a former boss told me. He had been a programmer before he had been a manager, and he said, "oh, you haven't written a compiler yet? When you write a compiler you graduate to a whole new level of programming."

I have learned Lisp and in that sense I have graduated to a new level, although I've still not used it enough to make macros an everyday joy. I still prefer JavaScript and I am going to learn some Ruby and some CoffeeScript.

But I have no idea what writing a compiler gets you, so if anyone wants to tell me about it, I'd love to hear.