I've been tossing around the thought exercise of writing a minimal Python interpreter. Do you feel similarly about writing an interpreter, or strictly a compiler?

(I have studied formal languages a little bit... enough to know the basics of finite automata, context-free grammars, lexers, etc.)

I can't exactly say since I've never built an interpreter, but I am in the process of building a compiler (it's been a challenging and rewarding experience thus far), but I'm sure you would learn a lot from both endeavors. If you already had this project on your mind you should definitely go for it.