Quite frankly I'd rather be working with robots than building text adventure games (been there, done that: when I was 13). And while building a meta-circular e

Quite frankly I'd rather be working with robots than building text adventure games (been there, done that: when I was 13). And while building a meta-circular evaluator is interesting, I don't see how it can be considered a central tenet of introductory computer science. Also, both Python and Java have implementations that are meta-circular (PyPy, Jikes RVM, and Squawk), so it's not like you're shutting the door on these concepts to beginner students by bootstrapping them with conceptually-limited languages.