>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, bab

>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.