On the other hand, if you want to do something else in addition to a prime sieve than some sensible advice on tooling can save a lot of grief down the road. A couple of years ago I decided to learn Ocaml but never progressed much farther than writing a couple of Project Euler problems. Recently I decided to relearn Ocaml with the Real World Ocaml[1] book and, in retrospect, one of my favorite things about the book is their recommendations on tooling[2]. The improved REPL and the vim plugin they recommend are the sort of thing that make learning the language and its libraries much more pleasant but are also the sort of thing I wouldn't think of installing on my own if all you told me to install was the compiler (which kind of explains why I never went very far in my previous attempt at learning the language).
[1] http://realworldocaml.org/ [2] https://github.com/realworldocaml/book/wiki/Installation-Ins...