Wow. That has to be the first reference to that book I've ever seen. My father (an electrical engineering professor) bought it for me, especially relevant considering my chosen profession and real name ;-) Anyway, I've been thinking recently about writing a platform for my kids to tinker with. We have a Wii, and I've got the homebrew dev kit, along with the nous to make it work (I develop software for a living). What I want to do is put something together where people can author stuff, easily, in (possibly restricted variants of) Ruby, C, Logo, and probably a Pascal flavour. It's an educational thing. I'd see the languages being offered in the system as a 'grade' - you do all the Logo problems to unlock the next language. I leave the ordering as an exercise to the reader ;-) And the actual design as a surprise of mine! There aren't any BBC's, C64's or Speccy's anymore - what are the kids going to do? Turn into script k1dd1es, sadly at a guess. Or talented malware authors. It's not the like the demo scene gets much creds anymore (IMHO - please don't take this as flamebait).

No, no, no. At least this job gets you drunk: http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/chi/814181712.html