There is a lot less bullshittery surrounding the acquisition of notebooks and pens than there is around setting up certain software. A ~year ago I decided to set up a rails development environment, having no experience with it or ruby. I assembled a list of repeatable instructions as I went. It took me about two days, and had over 50 steps. If you are experienced with the domain, you could probably do it in 5 minutes, but there is not a good reason why it should require so much specialized knowledge just to get it set up.