I’d love to see something like this but designed to run on esp32 or raspberry pi 2530. Either can handle basic HDMI and USB. Or a little <$100 laptop with a 7” display.

Easy to think raspberry pi, but with a full Linux you won’t get that intrinsic understanding that you fully control the hardware, you never control the “bare metal” unless you are a much more advanced user.

IMHO the feeling of not being in full control of your computing device is not a good starting point. I’m very fortunate to have started out on my 8kb BASIC machine.

https://miniscript.org/files/MiniScript-QuickRef.pdf:

“A class or object is a map with a special __isa entry that points to the parent. This is set automatically when you use the new operator.

  Shape = {"sides":0}
  Square = new Shape
  Square.sides = 4
  x = new Square
  x.sides  // 4

”

So

- Shape is a map (it is created using the syntax defined earlier, using a literal string as key)

- Square is a class?

- x is an object?

Or is this language prototype based? If so, why mention the word “class”? If not, isn’t it confusing to use “new someMap” to create a class and “new someClass” to create an object?

I also find it curious to see that division is defined on lists and strings. What would that mean?

Edit: reading https://miniscript.org/files/Strout_iSTEM-Ed2021.pdf, it is prototype based. That’s interesting for a teaching language.

It's so odd that the only nontrivial example code in the paper is completely buggy. The find longest common prefix function of a list of strings fails (try ["a", "bc", "ade"]).

Also check out Pico8 and Picotron.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/

I was a bit confused until I realized that https://miniscript.org/ isn't the same programming language as https://bitcoin.sipa.be/miniscript/.

Also check out this one. It is a real physical computer: https://www.francksauer.com/index.php/micro-8

I don't get why this kind of projects need :

- a manual

- an installer

when you have Web pages can now

- be offline (PWA)

- be responsive and run on pretty much any device

- run pretty much anything thanks to WASM but anyway already have JS/HTML/CSS as bare minimum

- can have the instructions AND the runtime on the same page, on any device, instantly

- can connect with physical hardware, see recent https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/05/web-serial-support-in-fire... or even with APIs.

Free but not Open Source? Did I miss that?

Looks cool. I most enjoyed the zombies game someone uploaded on itch.io. One thing to note is that game speeds feel very fast to me. I barely did anything in the asteroids game and the others also seem to run quite fast. It could be just me.

I wonder how hard it would be translate this to Dutch. I would like my kids to start experimenting but that’s a bit impractical if they need to learn English first..