[emp]

I agree, but would add I wish student had to build compilers/interpreters for 3 languages: Forth, Lisp and something like C. As a student we went right into C: BNFs, lex, yacc, emitting machine code, optimizations, etc. Very interesting but the beauty of simplicity is lost in it all. Forth at first is baffling - there is no syntax! It's amazing how little you need to get going. Lisp, to just get right to the parse tree. And you already have intuition on the interpreter part. And finally C or Java for all the upfront complexity required.