What are the ultimate goals?

What are the ultimate goals?

At our dinner the question came up of what are our ultimate goals in designing the ideal programming language for children (and other learners). One answer is that we want to give kids (and as wide a collection of them as possible) the power to express themselves computationally. Alan Kay expressed it well here. We want a language that is truly general purpose and not based upon a limited special-purpose computation model. Or maybe the goal shouldn't be a single programming language but a collection of languages.

Besides giving children the ability to express themselves in fundamentally new and powerful ways, we also want to give them objects to think and learn with. And give them new mathematically interesting objects to think about as well.