HOWTO: Optimizing Mac OS X UNIX environment for better programming

Question

I'm new to programming (mostly for scripting utilities - python, perl, ruby) and work with a Macbook running snow leopard.

Despite what Mac is capable of out of the box as a UNIX based OS, I still feel like I am struggling routinely to get the necessary libraries, programs, etc that make my programming tasks move more swimmingly. That is, I feel like every time I need to do something, I have to download another library, another plug-in, another whatever and then have to spend 3 hours configuring my system (export PATH here, copy files to this that or the other local/bin, search over and over for solutions to a "broken" program etc). By the end of it all, I'm no longer in the mood to carry out the task I set out to do.

This leads me to feel like my computer is a huge mess and not optimized for handling routine programming tasks.

I have macports and regularly get installs from there. But I was wondering if someone knows of a boilerplate resource for the top X things you need to do to make your mac more programmer-friendly, to make it more Linux-y, in a sense.

Answer 1

I installed Fink

Answer 2

I will be honest with you. I have run into the same set of problems time and time again. I decided that the best route for me was to set up VMWare Fusion, and install my favourite Linux distribution on it. That is where I do most of my development work that is troublesome to set up on OS X itself in the first place. Of course, I am not in the habit of using fancy IDEs or editors, and since I love Terminal.app, I can keep to using it while getting my work done (on the VM remotely).