I humbly disagree. My kid is going to get something totally straight forward imperative and easy to begin with, something in the realm of «one print "I am the best", two goto one». I strongly believe these are the basic building blocks which make everything else easy to understand, and they give you a good feeling about how the things work at the bare metal.

I think it's a shame that QBasic isn't bundled with Windows anymore. That was how I got started, on some old 486s in my chemistry/programming teacher's classroom, and it was really a fantastic integrated programming experience, very simple, but with room to do some really cool things. I remember that by the end of a year, a friend and I made a really terrible, but mostly working, version of Slime Volleyball, with graphics and even some basic MIDI sound effects.

Doesn't come with windows but here is Microsoft small basic

I think "looks excellent for children" is a sign that it might be excellent for experts. We want something that can represent a system in the clearest simplest way possible. So simple a child could see how it works and so simple that mistakes are obvious. The question becomes "Will Eve scale to systems that solve real-world problems and not just toy examples for kids?" Will an Eve solution for a real-world problem look simpler and easier to understand than it does now in the languages we're using today? One data point in its favor is how much they've accomplished in so few lines of code if the IDE, the compiler, and a relational database are implemented in 6500 lines of code.

  Eve's language runtime includes a parser, a compiler, an incremental fixpointer, database indexes, and a full relational query engine with joins, negation, ordered choices, and aggregates. You might expect such a thing would amount to 10s or maybe 100s of thousands of lines of code, but our entire runtime is currently ~6500 lines of code. That's about 10% the size of React's source folder. :)

Yeah, this kind of short feedback loop where mistakes are easy to find is perfect for a teaching environment.

iPython, tonicdev... and now this.

I actually totally agree. Yes. Or even for teaching in high school/college.