I love Ruby the language, but I absolutely hate Ruby the platform. I've never run across a more hostile landmine-ridden terrain for new developers. Every time I have to ramp up a new dev, I just resign myself to the fact that it's going to take anywhere from an hour to three or four to get everything installed. God forbid they've actually tried to use Ruby before on their machines.
I've dipped on job prospects which involved code challenges that require me to get their codebase working on my machine. I inevitably wind up having to troubleshoot their broken setup and that takes way more time than doing the actual challenge.
Ruby desperately needs innovation in this space. Bundler and rbenv / chruby / rvm just isn't good enough. Vagrant / Chef just isn't good enough. I understand that dependency management is a hard problem, but other languages aren't half the headache that Ruby is.
Before the tire fire that is rvm became "standard", it was normal to just download the version you needed and build it from source. There's nothing forcing us to use crappy, obscure tools like rvm and rbenv. And I agree with you on all points.
It's a total shitshow. But since ruby manages everything with environment variables, you need some kind of tooling to manage multiple versions. Horrendous.
Ruby should just standardize on a way to point projects to rubies. Instead of a zillion environment variables, just a shebang. It's how everything else works.
I've dipped on job prospects which involved code challenges that require me to get their codebase working on my machine. I inevitably wind up having to troubleshoot their broken setup and that takes way more time than doing the actual challenge.
Ruby desperately needs innovation in this space. Bundler and rbenv / chruby / rvm just isn't good enough. Vagrant / Chef just isn't good enough. I understand that dependency management is a hard problem, but other languages aren't half the headache that Ruby is.