Baby Emacs?

[kj]

I am teaching programming to a few co-workers (research biologists).
Most of them want some recommendation for a text editor.  Of course,
I recommend to them Emacs, but I would prefer to recommend a simpler
version of Emacs, one with fewer features, and also fewer ways to
get confused.  Is there such a thing?

(A different co-worker suggested nano, but it does not look
sufficiently Emacs-like to me.)

TIA!

kynn