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.
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.