I realize that I may not know the language in which the code has to be written (I am an experienced programmer); but I think I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

There is a post by @tokenika on building an EOS development environment. The full article focuses on native Ubuntu builds run on Windows 10. I commented on it as I've been meaning to use Ubuntu on Windows 10 since learning of the feature, see https://steemit.com/eos/@johnchamberlain/re-tokenika-installing-and-running-eos-on-windows-20170929t171859474z

Official EOS Dawn build guides for Ubuntu and MacOS are on the EOS github.