I do agree with the author a bit. It's not that all these toolchains are useless (they aren't) -- its just that they should be a far more invisible part of the process than they are. The pinnacle of this frustration was when I used to contract native iOS apps. The sheer amount of crap you have to crawl through to do something nontrivial is ridiculous - and I'm not even talking about getting into the app store.

This is one reason I started to fall in love with javascript. I've been a longtime critic of the language, but I'll be damned if there is not an easier way to build, test, debug, and distribute code.

Growing up, I learned from MS QBASIC - which was an incredibly easy portal into coding. It is a shame no such things are commonly available today.