Getting a rails dev environment setup used to be pretty painful, but thanks to a bunch of great tools (brew, rvm, rb-env, bundler, pow), and many blog posts, things are much better now than in the past. I can easily get brew, ruby, rails, Xcode, zsh, emacs and my entire dev environment set up on a brand new computer in a few hours these days (bounded only by network and CPU), and then get to work right away.
It is a different story for someone completely new. When I have time to sit down and help my brother and friends interested in getting started building websites, I recommend Rails (or Sinatra these days). The entire first session is usually devoted to helping configure their environment, and explaining the various tools they may need to know about when they are on their own. This is before even getting to the bit about learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby. All of this is usually a complete waste of time because they have most likely lost me after typing in "cd" or "mkdir" for the first time. Yehuda's proposal nicely solves the configuration step for a beginner (the only class of developer for whom I think it is a seriously debilitating problem), but that is really the least of worries for someone new to web development in this day and age.
It is a different story for someone completely new. When I have time to sit down and help my brother and friends interested in getting started building websites, I recommend Rails (or Sinatra these days). The entire first session is usually devoted to helping configure their environment, and explaining the various tools they may need to know about when they are on their own. This is before even getting to the bit about learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, and Ruby. All of this is usually a complete waste of time because they have most likely lost me after typing in "cd" or "mkdir" for the first time. Yehuda's proposal nicely solves the configuration step for a beginner (the only class of developer for whom I think it is a seriously debilitating problem), but that is really the least of worries for someone new to web development in this day and age.