Gentoo. Literally the entire system is a build environment. Imagine a single environment that’s capable of compiling thousands of different packages and managing dependencies etc.

NixOS. It’s really good for building multiple discrete environments specific to a development project, and it’s done via a functional declarative language that’s right up a programmer’s alley. You can specify everything precisely to what you want for that environment including all dependencies and not have them pollute each other when you switch builds.

But it’s a steep learning curve and the documentation could be better, but it’s probably fine if you’re used to learning new languages.

https://dev.to/dinex-dev/getting-started-with-nixos-flakes-a-modern-approach-to-configuration-management-39p7

I’d say ArchLinux/ArtixLinux, because of the ease to publish/install packages to/from AUR (Arch’s User Repository).

What does a programmer need?

• a text editor or IDE
• language specific tool chains for building, running and testing your code

This doesn’t seem to be something a distro can solve beyond making it possible to install this stuff.

Maybe the closest is nixos, because it allows a lot of flexibility in setting up different development environments that are fully reproducible. Gentoo is also close, as it allows the same but in a different way (without the extent of reproducible guarantees).

Short answer is no, I think because what tools you need for programming change so much based on the development you’re doing. C++ developers need compiler toolchain stuff that Javascript developers would never need to look at and vice versa.

Curveball answer is that modern extensible IDEs with the power of language servers and plugins have kind of become this. I’d massively recommend properly getting into one of the following and learning how to configure new languages and plugins:

• VScode
• Neovim
• Emacs
• Helix

(Sure I’ve probably missed some great options, feel free to flame me on why notepad++ should be OPs first choice)