I worked with a guy, in about 2000(?), who wanted to play with Atmel microcontrollers, he broke his leg badly and was out of commission for a while. He didn't have any programming tools, just the manual and a library of components. He built the base board and used switches and logic to programme it. He used that first Atmel device to build an ISP for another device, he built it so that he could write applications on his Psion PDA in assembly. He build an assembler and compiler for his PDA!
* >> The Arduino “IDE” barely beats notepad.exe in functionality and project management.*