I don't know about "most people" but I think a machine like this DCPU-16 is better than learning Python or Ruby. Those languages are huge and full of complexity

I don't know about "most people" but I think a machine like this DCPU-16 is better than learning Python or Ruby. Those languages are huge and full of complexity. With a 16-bit machine with a tiny instruction set, the student actually has a chance of getting the feeling, 'I know everything there is to know about this system'. And that connects to a piece of wisdom I love from Design Principles Behind Smalltalk: "If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual". And there's a certain concreteness to such a machine. The mental model has no vagueness at all. You could imagine building a physical copy of it and playing the role of CPU--adding small numbers, moving data between registers and memory, etc. I've played with this idea myself before of using an invented 16-bit machine as a teaching device. Maybe it's just a case of personal differences, but as a starting programmer, I would have been extremely excited about a simple programmable thing that I can fully understand and use to do things within a game world. Python is cool too but it's overwhelming. There are learn-Python books that are thicker than most of my university textbooks.