Is this a good approach for first attempt to create my own language and compiler?
That sounds like a fine way to start, and you'll become familiar with the issues involved.

How's it going?

At a certain point, consider learning more about programming language implementation techniques from


a book like Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition)
open courseware for MIT's Computer Language Engineering course
a MOOC like Udacity's Programming Languages: Building a Web Browser
Stanford's Programming Languages course


It's also worth investigating libraries to use such as parser generators, although some people swear by the recursive descent parsing approach as easier to build, also good at generating helpful error messages.

Another tip: It's easier to implement a programming language in a language like Clojure than Java. (Clojure is a modern Lisp dialect that's hosted on Java.) E.g. your intermediate representation could be a list of Clojure forms. They handle reading &amp; writing as readable text, and you can construct &amp; interpret (eval) them quicker and easier than text.