I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of software development tools. It is now just expected that IDEs, compilers, tooling etc are free and OSS. On the one hand this enables bottom-up innovation and shorter development cycles. On the other hand setting up a development environment is a royal pain in the butt. And a big turnoff for newbies -- they begin to think that programming is some sort of IT job about installing and troubleshooting software. Even when you manage to set everything up there is constant maintenance cost as you update software and as new things come out.
At the very least, I would love to see companies created around popular open source tools and verticals to create designed end-to-end experiences. Download, double-click, start coding, and see something on the screen.
There are non-terrible development stacks. Some of them are even free. Unfortunately too much of it is endless turtles-all-the-way-down yak shaving marathons, like in the JS world. I forget whether I'm supposed to grunt, gulp, babble, or barf.
You just have to get out of the churn-for-churn's-sake cesspools. There are high-quality, stable software stacks out there, where the Cambrian explosions and rediscovery of ideas from a generation ago have already passed.
>Unfortunately too much of it is endless turtles-all-the-way-down yak shaving marathons, like in the JS world. I forget whether I'm supposed to grunt, gulp, babble, or barf.
I don't use any of 'em. If you can afford to give the finger to those not running in a near-POSIX environment, you can just use makefiles or npm scripts: write your code, and run shell scripts to build it, the way God, Doug, Dennis, Brian, and Ken intended.
As for good dev environments, I will not leave my beloved emacs (C-x C-e in geiser-mode means that you can run your software as you write it, and I love it: Most dynamic languages have something similar), but that would intimidate newbies. Gedit and a shell is probably the best environment to start them with: It's about as simple as you get, and every developer is expected to have a rudimentary knowledge of shell, so best to start early.
And if you work behind a corporate proxy, expect all of the above to be an order of magnitude worse. Oh you set the proxy setting in the IDE/Shell/Package Manager? You forgot about x, y and z; and websites foo, bar, and bas are blocked!
Transparent proxies and 802.1x auth have been around for a while. Even my high school got off the "you must configure a proxy server in every application" train. IMO that is just poor IT.
I remember a few years ago, before Git had NTLM support (for proxies), I had to use all kinds of terrible hacks to get online. Recently, the proxy I'm behind for at least 8 hours a day has been changed to accept Basic and Negotiate, but I didn't realise that until I'd spent a not insignificant amount of time yelling at NPM.
Even if you do get online, don't forget to configure the MITM CA cert!
Next up, apps that try to execute from %LOCALAPPDATA% (Squirrel installers). This is blocked by most AppLocker configs.
Package management's come a long long way in the last couple decades tho, setting up a dev environment (assuming you're connected to the internet and can write to the appropriate directories) is easier than ever.
At the very least, I would love to see companies created around popular open source tools and verticals to create designed end-to-end experiences. Download, double-click, start coding, and see something on the screen.