Comment by HelloNurse

If parsing "influences how the language can be structured and also how it should be structured for performance reasons" it's probably going to be a mediocre language, in which self-imposed constraints interfere with useful special features resulting in a bland design lacking competitive advantages.

Pascal has already been cited in other comments as having been designed for ease of parsing, but the Turbo Pascal compiler is an isolated masterpiece, and high-quality compilation at decent speed is normally more useful than cheap compilation at ludicrous speed.

Maybe parsing seems a large part of constructing a compiler because it's naturally the first task and because it's likely to be entangled with designing the syntax of the language, which can pose difficulties (e.g. ambiguities, context sensitivity, messy operator precedence).