As an ambitious undergrad, I took the entire language theory/compiler series offered, which ended up in some graduate level courses. I still can't believe the amount of work and hassle involved in creating the very simple compiler for a C-like language we implemented on a 32 bit target architecture - when I got to the end of the series, the last course's syllabus was one sentence: "Reverse engineer the JVM."

At that point I realized I was in over my head and walked out. Fun read, thanks for sharing.