I'm all for people doing whatever hobby project they want to do for learning and entertainment purposes. But I don't really understand the appeal of straight porting something from one language to another.

For example, I'm a daily gvim user. If I were going to do a hobby project text editor, I would emphatically not make a clone of gvim, I'd make a text editor with exactly the features I want that behaves exactly how I want. If you're going to invest that much time in a project, why not do something creative and unique?