The intention is good: making a modern, yet simple programming environment for beginners. The result is bad: including GOTO and omitting parameter passing makes programming simple as in assembler, not simple as in helping you do the right thing.

I have no idea where this un-natural fear of the goto comes from - I suspect it is a university CS dept. myth. I feel pretty confident that I can write well structured maintainable code in any language that is Turing complete - and this little basic exceeds that requirement and then some.

I can't wait to give it to my young son and see what he can do with it.

I thought I made my point clear: including Goto in this supposedly minimalistic language doesn't guide learners in the right direction (and using it in the examples even less so). Goto is not used in modern programming style even though some specific constructs can be expressed succinctly with it.

Regarding Turing-completeness: Perhaps you can write maintainable code in Intercal or Whitespace, but most people can't or at least don't want to write maintainable code without functions and static scoping.

I would like to take you up on that offer and see some maintainable brainfk code.

This is a cool idea--is there something similar for linux? My seven-year-old wants to play, but he's really still learning to read!

http://shoooes.net/ comes to mind.

If he's learning to read, there's http://scratch.mit.edu/. Scratch doesn't really have a native version for Linux though - you can wine it, or you can try the (somewhat unofficial) build at the following link. I've tried both, and they work alright.

http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?id=305

Scratch runs on Squeak Smalltalk apart from some features that require a Scratch-specific native extension to Squeak. Scratch is not free software, so no wonder distros don't package it. The Scratch guys have a package for the OLPC though.

Here's the best guide I've seen this far for installing Scratch on Ubuntu: http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=52179#p52179

I decided to start with a little python...just a little bit to add or subtract a number repeatedly. He was able to follow it, but not, of course, do it the first time. Maybe if his interest remains, he'll start playing with it be himself!

Thanks to you both for your help. Scratch does seem to be free-as-in-beer.....