It's good to see Notch working on the Little Coder problem, even if that's not his direct intention. :)
The verbatim search returns a very good match in #1 and about 80% of the results seem appropriate. It seems the recent synonyms fixes are not nearly enough.
And, for the interested: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2009-12-28-the-little-cod...
For what its worth, _why's article is the third result for me, and a couple other articles on it are in the top 10.
I started thinking that if I was going to get people interested in coding, I'd start with something more approachable - maybe something like a subset of Python, Java, Ruby or even JavaScript (it's where so many people write little programs anyway now). I heard Lua mentioned as a good scripting language too.
Then I wondered - is this CPU a reasonable target for those kinds of little languages? Is this a way to be language independent and have them all? If so, why not something more like the JVM to make it easy?
It seems to me that coding for this CPU is more like a mini-game in the main game; the fact that it's a challenge is part of the game.
That said, I can see a nice friendly language becoming popular for non-time-critical tasks where ease of experimentation is most important. I just hope it's not BASIC. :)