This reminds me of my own programming language implementation journey. Years before I wrote Liberty BASIC I tried my hand at a programmable calculator program for the Commodore VIC-20. I didn’t get very far with that, but several years later I was working in a circuitboard factory where there was some CNC drilling routing platforms, and I decided to write a simple interpreter so we could check our work before risking actual physical material on the shop floor. Then I wrote a simple SQL style query language for a simple database we used at the factory. I found a copy of The Small-C Handbook at the New England Mobile Book Fair, and this provided the seeds by describing a C compiler bootstrapped in Z80 assembly language.
Finally, I wanted to create a robot battle programming game implemented in Smalltalk, inspired by Muse Software’s Robot War (or Crobots), and this actually turned into a BASIC for Windows. This was before Visual Basic was released.
So, did I know what I was doing? Sort of. I have always been hungry to know more, and I have kept on learning. Eventually I rewrote the core of the language in a much more proper way.