For the past year I have been working in PL/SQL it's like being on a different planet. The language is clunky and difficult to work with. The culture is weird (everyone uses TFS for version control, for example, if they use a VCS at all). The tooling is awful. No parser is available, meaning linters are only included in bulky GUI apps (TOAD is the worst, most unusable piece of software that I still use on a daily basis). I have resorted to Emacs and SQL*Plus but even Emacs has poor support for PL/SQL. No one wants to write open source tools for a proprietary language.
PL/SQL is definitely not sexy, but it's undoubtedly the best way to interact with an Oracle DB and the raw power is amazing. I have accomplished some incredible things with it, but I can't help but feel like everything I do is already out of date and needs to be replaced with something better. Any tips for making my experience a little more pleasant?