Simple, easily modifiable roguelikes?

[xibalba]

Are there any roguelikes that are very simple and minimalist, which would be a good place to start from for a non-programmer? Are there any scriptable roguelike engines?

I like Cataclsym, but I want to rip out everything specific to that game and make my own stuff. Unfortunately, I lack the math to really learn a programming language - I'm limited to copy->paste, and extraploation from comments.

http://whalesdev.com/forums/index.php

And I don't care about graphics (I actually like Cataclysm's bare bones UI best), or cross-platform (linux user here).

[Magnate]

For simple and minimalist, google 7DRL. The problem with those is that they tend to lack documentation on modding (as the name implies).