I've been working on a programming language in my spare time, also. I call it OWL. Its not quite ready, but here's a link anyways: https://github.com/bsurmanski/wlc

OWL aims to be a low level object-oriented language without a garbage collector (albeit with reference counting).

The best 'example' program using OWL right now is a game I made for the 48 hour game jam, Global Game Jam 2015: https://github.com/bsurmanski/ggj2015

I agree with the poster that making a programming language from scratch is a great way to explore programming. On top of that, its a great experience seeing able to implement all of those features you wish were in your favorite language (or find out why they aren't).