That is great advice. That immediate results thing is ideal even for me. Not long ago I found out what a REPL was. A basic language that is easy to understand with a REPL for immediate response sounds good. But I wonder if there is such a thing.
Or maybe that is a venture I will take myself.
Old command line driven basic interpreters work this way, you can either issue a command and the system executes it immediately:
> PRINT "HELLO"
HELLO
Or you can put a line number on the start, and it stores it until it is told to run it:
> 10 PRINT “HELLO"
> 20 GOTO 10
> RUN
HELLO
...
This is ideal for teaching. Look up "BBC BASIC" for example. There are interpreters for Windows, dos, Linux and more, and 30 years of documentation.
Be careful though as it can teach some bad habits like spaghetti programming!
I cut my teeth on this language, and some days I look at C++ and miss the simplicity of my old 8 bit...
The computer this language was included with was designed for use in primary schools (first grade) and shared massive success in the UK much like the apple ][ in the US: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro
If you can find one for an affordable price, they're lots of fun :)