[Please also check out Part 1]
In this new post about a modern programming operating system I'm going to comment on what a flood of people gave me in the comments on the post and on Hacker News. I'm very thankful for the overwhelming support and ideas that came from those comments and has inspired me to keep thinking about this topic.
Running IPython with its shell seemed to be overwhelmingly a popular choice, though the shell needs some work I think its the closest match. I love using IPython, and I think it gives a decent interface for working with the code. With the shell option it looks like you'd get some OS commands as well, which may be more than what I want but I think its a solid starting off point. Python on Wheels was the major contributor to this method and even got it running on a Rasbery PI which seems to be the most ideal platform to get a project like this running on -- lots of people in the comments seem to agree as well.
Some people talked about Python Notebook, and Although interesting, its still a webpage and with that comes all the distractions. Some others talked about Ruby and I like the idea, I'm not sure if a 7 year old needs to be concerned with indentation yet :) and Ruby is a pretty friendly language to code in, with lots of published examples and tutorials. Beyond that I'm unsure of what might be available to make ruby viable in this platform, does it have a IPython Shell equivalent that we can hack on to get the desired results?
Some people said why bother, why? because I think it would be fun, and I'm glad that most of the community seems to agree with me!
[HN Post, may have more comments]
UPDATE: Just ran across Kidsruby, which has a version that runs on a Raspberry PI, I think I'll have to check into it a bit more.