Boris, thanks again for the recommendation.
This should net two skills in one pass: 1. learn lisp (by writing new lisps!) and 1. grok the VM language.
I spent the morning grokking the outline of the book/tasks
* The Basics of Interpretation
* Lisp, 1, 2, ....w
* Escape & Return Continuations
* Assignment and Side Effects
* Denotational Semantics
* Fast Interpretation
* Compilation
* Evaluation and Reflection
* Macros: Their Use and Abuse
* Compiling into C
* Essence of an Object System
The chapter on defining a LISP in Lambda Calculus looks very, very interesting..."if the math works, the program works, if not, not." may be naive, but removing ambiguity appeals to me.
Hopefully, after doing the work I can begin to contribute at a systems level instead of the "application developer level" I am in.
cordially,
t