Not sure what programming language you're used to, but as a VB/C#/MSSQL (visual studio) person I found that Addon Studio was a nice, familiar starting point. You get the visual designer that does a lot of work for you and you can focus on what you're trying to do.
https://addonstudio.fallenworlds.org/wiki/AddOn_Studio
They also have a very active discord presence:
https://discord.com/invite/eAGb7Rc
The resulting addon is not as "lightweight" as handcoding in notepad++ but it's useful as a starting point. I personally tinkered with it for awhile to get more used to WoW Lua in general and then wrote my addon entirely in Lua.
Going through the Lua manual could be helpful, there are definitely some things that Lua does differently to VB (for example). So getting your head around basic syntax rules definitely helps.
As for your example, you mentioned not getting any errors. I assume you're using bugsack and buggrabber?