I think it's fine to show that you can do it, I think the main thing is to flip the order a bit.
E.g. "here's a cool thing thing we can do <demonstrate the outcome of significantly changing a readable syntax>" to hook people, "here's how <show how you change syntax with higher level helpers>", "and if you really want to know how to bootstrap this from basics <here comes the linenoise>".
Maybe compare how e.g. Forth is often introduced, with how people describe bootstrapping of a simplistic Forth like Jonesforth or Sectorforth [2]. Showing people how they can define their own words and it fundamentally changes how they work with the language afterwards is cool to a lot of people who have no interest in details like how you an implement even numbers with a minimal set of primitives (e.g. Sectorforth relies on that - it doesn't have builtin numbers[3]).
Both are interesting to me, but I'm weird, and I think for most people it'd be easier to maintain their interest if those two aspects are either separate articles or at least if the bootstrapping is relegated to a standalone section they're clearly told they can skip.
[3] The Sectorforth Hello world defines every numeric constant it needs like this:
: -1 ( x -- x -1 ) dup dup nand dup dup nand and ;
: 0 -1 dup and ;
: 1 -1 dup + dup and ;
: 2 1 1 + ;
: 4 2 2 + ;
: 6 2 4 + ;
Which is fun if you're a language geek. Not so convincing if you want to know if Forth is fort you [EDIT: That mistake was wholly unintentional, but I'll leave it].
E.g. "here's a cool thing thing we can do <demonstrate the outcome of significantly changing a readable syntax>" to hook people, "here's how <show how you change syntax with higher level helpers>", "and if you really want to know how to bootstrap this from basics <here comes the linenoise>".
Maybe compare how e.g. Forth is often introduced, with how people describe bootstrapping of a simplistic Forth like Jonesforth or Sectorforth [2]. Showing people how they can define their own words and it fundamentally changes how they work with the language afterwards is cool to a lot of people who have no interest in details like how you an implement even numbers with a minimal set of primitives (e.g. Sectorforth relies on that - it doesn't have builtin numbers[3]).
Both are interesting to me, but I'm weird, and I think for most people it'd be easier to maintain their interest if those two aspects are either separate articles or at least if the bootstrapping is relegated to a standalone section they're clearly told they can skip.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368212
[2] https://github.com/cesarblum/sectorforth
[3] The Sectorforth Hello world defines every numeric constant it needs like this:
Which is fun if you're a language geek. Not so convincing if you want to know if Forth is fort you [EDIT: That mistake was wholly unintentional, but I'll leave it].