I've not worked with Salesforce for a long time, but it used to have the worst language I've ever used. Some sort of crazy Java/SQL hybrid. And the dev tool for it was written in Adobe Air.
Yes and no. Apex, the backend language,is still probably 5-7 years behind where JAVA/.Net is, but considering the type of development that is being done with it, it's not that bad. Then,on the from end it's all JavaScript and their component based Lightning framework. Tooling? I'm working with VSCode and there's some relatively recent CI/CD related stuff that makes the process better.
Is it still like that or have they moved on?