I'm particularly sympathetic to the discussion of gems / rvm. Every non-trivial ruby project I've worked on has started with at least a tour of the outer circle

I'm particularly sympathetic to the discussion of gems / rvm. Every non-trivial ruby project I've worked on has started with at least a tour of the outer circles of dependency hell, and I bailed on at least one Rails project partly because I couldn't get the environment up on my machine after two weeks of effort. I really like Ruby the language. Not so sure about the ecosystem of modules, tools, and frameworks, but maybe that part gets better after you put in a few years.