В порядке флейма: если хочешь быть лучшим программистом -- напиши компилятор. Цитата из статьи по ссылке. Физкульт-привет перловщикам! http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl
The disease, nay, the virus of programming-language religion has a simple cure: you just write a compiler. Or an interpreter. One for any language other than the one you know best. It's as easy as that. After you write a compiler (which, to be sure, is a nontrivial task, but if there's some valid program out there that you couldn't ever write, then you're not justified in calling yourself a programmer), the disease simply vanishes. In fact, for weeks afterwards, you can't look at your code without seeing right through it, with exactly the same sensation you get when you stare long enough at a random-dot stereogram: you see your code unfold into a beautiful parse tree, with scopes winding like vines through its branches, the leaves flowering into assembly language or bytecode.
The disease, nay, the virus of programming-language religion has a simple cure: you just write a compiler. Or an interpreter. One for any language other than the one you know best. It's as easy as that. After you write a compiler (which, to be sure, is a nontrivial task, but if there's some valid program out there that you couldn't ever write, then you're not justified in calling yourself a programmer), the disease simply vanishes. In fact, for weeks afterwards, you can't look at your code without seeing right through it, with exactly the same sensation you get when you stare long enough at a random-dot stereogram: you see your code unfold into a beautiful parse tree, with scopes winding like vines through its branches, the leaves flowering into assembly language or bytecode.