Valuable input! I actually am an undergrad student. There are a lot of frameworks out there that support writing languages, with MPS being one of them.

If I'd start from scratch again and had a little more time, I'd frankly try writing an interpreter myself, instead of trying to conform to weird framework syntax, which I won't be able to reuse in any other context.

Saying syntax design is fiddly is an understatement. I focused very hard on getting an abstract syntax somehow finished before working on generation in my first iteration. Then I had so much technical debt, that I couldn't get anything to work and had to rewrite a lot. So I scrapped it all and started again, starting with top level concepts including generation and only implementing some lower level ones, once everything around it worked properly.