That's kind of what I'm talking about. I've never heard of Pry. With Rails I have to learn about the 100 most common gems (devise, paperclip, mongomapper or mon

That's kind of what I'm talking about. I've never heard of Pry. With Rails I have to learn about the 100 most common gems (devise, paperclip, mongomapper or mongoid), Pry (thanks for that), bundler, rvm, and ActionEverything before I can be productive (or understand a simple app) . With Node.js, something newer with less "maturity", I figure out npm and I'm good to go. I really don't think it's FUD to say that Rails has gotten much bigger in the past 5 years, and it's definitely not FUD to say that as codebases and tooling grows, so does barrier to entry. The specific thing I guess you're objecting to is that it's harder for a noob to understand implicit imports and where something is coming from if you don't know much about what you're importing. If you use a tool to solve that language deficiency, that doesn't remove the deficiency from the language. By that logic, adding an IDE to Java makes it a very concise language.