[gracenotes]

There was a talk at Strange Loop 2014, "Our Shared Joy of Programming", which was just recently put on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_zW63dcZB0

The whole talk is stimulating, but the parts relevant to Sonic Pi are its Overtone (http://overtone.github.io/) lineage at about 9:05, a demo at about 17:36, and the experience using it in schools (http://www.raspberrypi.org/sonic-pi-live-summer-school/) at about 26:48.

What I got out of it was that it's a language which is meant to be both fully featured and easy for kids to pick up, to get interested in music, programming, or both. Maybe not so much programming as just "computational thinking". It has less incidental complexity than EDSLs (like Overtone) or traditional tools which expose more of the synthesis pipeline. Compared to most video game/graphics frameworks, which are also used in education, you can get to more polished content faster.