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.