> By Ruby, Python and JavaScript hackery I was meaning rvm, venv / pip, and npm. I have the most experience with rvm, and the hackery part comes from the experi

> By Ruby, Python and JavaScript hackery I was meaning rvm, venv / pip, and npm. I have the most experience with rvm, and the hackery part comes from the experience when I created a web interface that could instruct the server to do ruby tasks. Turned out that rvm (and also bundler) does a bunch of stuff to the environment of the user, that's sometimes inaccessible, even if you invoke a "login shell" programatically. One of these "hacks" is doing a bunch of stuff when the user navigates to a Ruby project directory with cd, which is when rvm creates or uses the existing virtual env for the project - named is a specific way based on the directory name. I solved this of course but the discovery was quite annoying. Keeping the "right context" when you do things in different directories with the same shell config is, unfortunately, a problem that I don't think is easy to solve. My preferred approach is to use direnv (https://direnv.net/ https://direnv.net/), but that's not perfect either. As for rvm, I think that a lot of people at some point discovered that rvm was maybe doing a bit too much (in particular, it would also manage gem sets, something that seems superfluous with Bundler). I think that's a reason why rbenv and chruby emerged as lighter-weight alternatives which are a bit less magic. I haven't seen many people use rvm anymore in recent years. By contrast, Bundler doesn't really do anything to your shell. > Now that I think about it, every single one of the programming ecosystems I used were quite annoying. That's something I agree with. As a more recent convert to the JVM world (and mostly just for lack of better alternatives), I'm still sometimes annoyed at the IDE-centrism (and UI-centrism, see also sonarqube) in this space. Luckily, things are already better than they were when I learned Java in university and "it runs in my IDE" was the default state of affairs...