Emerging from the shell of its gestation period this week is Koding, a cloud development environment and collaboration platform that offers free server access to every user alongside a "slew of programming languages" and easy browser-based set-up.

With an "informative" community of 40,000 beta user developers already in existence, Koding appears to be attempting to short cut the traditional route to programming competency where a developer might begin coding only after setting up local environments, being added as a user to multiple systems, and then spending considerable time learning the system they're going to be working on.

As with other drag-and-drop coding environments, Koding's approach may prove attractive to some, but will arguably jar with traditional programming purists and those bent on drilling their skills firmly down to the command line from the start.

With somewhat controversial showboating, Koding CEO Devrim Yasar asserts that, "Software development is a pain. We are working to change that by eliminating barriers and putting everything a developer needs in one place. Our goal is to see people spending their time creating cool things, not installing back-end programs and wasting their time and money setting them up."

This free development environment and tools includes a Linux development server that runs this "slew" of languages including Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, and Node.js.