1. I want kids to indent their code anyway; they may not realize it (or won't admit it), but this makes the code much easier for them to read. Kids will not do this unless they have to.
2. Unbalanced brackets are a major source of mistakes and confusion for my students. Relying purely on indentation resolves this problem—at the real cost of introducing indentation mistakes, but since I want kids to indent their code anyway, this is okay.
By the way, an adjacent recommendation is to configure the editor to indent with tabs instead of spaces (regardless of how you feel about tabs vs spaces in production code). Otherwise, kids will invariably end up with lines indented by 3 or 7 or some other wacky number of spaces. If possible, highlight the tabs in a different color so the kids don't use spaces by accident.
"easy-to-learn languages" use indentation because otherwise newbies would not indent at all
I you try teaching programming, you'll find that indentation is one of things students "optimize out" - it is not important to the program, it is opposite of lazy and it's not noticeably harmful on the tiny scale of programs you learn programming from
Indentation discipline only starts to matter when you need to work on the same code for quite some time and code itself takes a lot of space - the "read more then written" situation. And most study paths do not encounter this regime
From the Quick Reference guide here:
https://miniscript.org/files/MiniScript-QuickRef.pdf
"Indentation doesn't matter (except for readability)."
The fact that we use whitespace for layout is precisely why it's a bad idea to assign it semantic value. I'm a fan of both braces and semicolons for that reason.
That said, my preference is curly braces (or whatever) because I’ve found indentation is often a bother. Yes, most of the time you use indentation together with braces, but not every time. There are many occasions where code is clearer without (or with custom) indentation. Furthermore, indentation-based parsing makes experimentation and finding issues more difficult. Sometimes you need to extract a small part of a larger block to bung in a REPL or something and now you’re fighting with stupid errors because of formatting, adding to the frustration.
Regarding intuitiveness, for beginners I have some doubts it makes much of a difference, and if it does I also doubt indentation wins. If you know how to write (which is a prerequisite), you know what parenthesis and quotation marks are, you understand they encapsulate something separate from the rest. Indentation is a different concept.
That said, my preference is to use the tools built into my editor and available on the CLI or web to assist and fix formatting and syntax. You get instant feedback on incorrect formatting, and I generally find that synthetic scope mistakes (regardless of method) are eliminated.
The miniscript language itself is MIT License:
https://github.com/JoeStrout/miniscript
The Minimicro code doesn't seem to have any license in the repository or code:
I agree however that it's super cool to have real hardware to run this on.
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.
I have been playing around with a per scanline generated display on a rp2350 outputting to a tiny LCD. I think there's potential for some pretty fancy stuff on HDMI. A 2350 with PSRAM, HDMI connector plus a MicroSD for bulk filesytem, and USB for input could be quite a fun micro PC.
I would be tempted to make somthing that had a second RP2350 with its own PSRAM sitting unutilized just as a temptation to users to figure out how to get more out of the gadget and learn about different multiprocessing architectures.