MacOS Catalina: Slow by Design?

I completely understand why things are going the way they are as our computing environment has become ever more hostile. But I am very nostalgic for the time where I would power up a Vic-20 and within seconds be able to get to work.

Teaching my daughter to program on a modern computer, we spend more time bootstrapping and in process, than we do in actual development.

If that’s what you really want, grab a used ThinkPad and put Arch Linux on it. It will boot in a few seconds and is much more powerful than a Vic-20.

Still doesn't give you a programming environment, unless you want to do bash.

Yes it does. When you pacstrap you include base devel. From that moment onwards your you will have a full programming environment all ready to rock and roll on your installation.

Yes, and you have a full operating system and all the joys of modern development. You absolutely do not have anything like a VIC-20 that you can power on end have a basic programming environment 5 seconds later. At best, you turn it on and 5 seconds later have a python shell, where you can do a certain amount of development before you get to experience the joys of managing libraries and dependencies. Thus bringing us back to what I perceived as the primary complaint that there's way too much setup and baggage required just to get to the actual programming part.