getting started with plasmoid development

[D. R. Evans]

I want to write some plasmoids. However, it looks incredibly complicated
compared to (say) writing a superkaramba theme.

Is the information at
http://techbase.kde.org/Development/Tutorials/Plasma/GettingStarted
accurate? The first requirement seems to be to install and get running the
complete KDE4 development environment. Is all that really necessary? It
looks like a nightmare to me.

(Perhaps naïvely, I thought that writing a plasmoid would be about the same
 as writing a superkaramba theme, and it took all of 45 minutes to write
the first one of those, from start to finish.)

  Doc Evans

PS Are there any detailed instructions as to how to write a plasmoid in
Python? I haven't decided yet whether to use python or C++. I generally
prefer python for little projects that don't need a full-blown development
environment.

PPS Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask. It seems like a reasonable
place to me, but I hope I haven't annoyed anyone if it isn't.