IMHO Lisp-like languages are good for showing off the "back-end" of a compiler/interpreter, because tokenisation/parsing is completely trivial. On the other hand, you miss out a lot of the fun of parsing a "real" language, with precedences and a more nontrivial grammar.

One of the most enlightening points about interpreters/compilers is that, to a first approximation, the only difference between an interpreter and compiler is what it does when it walks the tree --- an interpreter executes the actions immediately, while a compiler generates code which executes those actions.

An amazing demonstration of this is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8558822 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8746054 . It doesn't actually build an AST, but implicitly creates one and walks it since it does recursive-descent parsing.

(Aside: I happened to glance at the URL at the same time as I was reading the Tokenisation section, and thought "Francis Tokes? How appropriate..." before looking more closely at the page title.)