Just to put some context on "you have to learn a lot of Unix cruft that shouldn't be strictly necessary to get started" (andybak; my emphasis. I just did an intro course on Python - it's not my first programming and I'm pretty familiar with Linux command lines.

That said after much trial and error I settled on PyCharm - installation can be done using GUI tools (it's in Ubuntu repos) and you don't need to leave the PyCharm interface to run interactive programs.

Then there are things like iPython, IDLE (part of raspbian I believe). The whole course used a purpose-made browser based interpreter so one didn't have to install if you didn't want to.

I actually took the course as I was seeing Python crop up in educational contexts and wanted a jump start on my children.

Python, and a ton more programming languages are available in repls, eg http://repl.it/languages/Python.