[mikeash]

It's far easier to start from a basic working shell that you can tweak than it is to build something from zero. Plenty of environments manage to pull off that basic working shell just fine. If you make a new app project in Xcode, the result builds and runs out of the box. If you make a new Android app project, the result builds and runs out of the box. I can try out Python code immediately after typing "python" at the command line.

Programming is inherently hard, but there's still a vast gulf between necessary and unnecessary difficulty. The problems here are solidly in the "unnecessary" category.