My experience of Ruby, which is admittedly a few years old, is that people did use multiple Ruby environments through e.g rbenv to manage different sets of gem versions, which is what "virtual envs" are the equivalent of.

Now, I do agree the Python tooling situation is kind of a mess, but there you can still do:

"pip install the-package"

And you're just as good, all the other tools are when you're trying to do stuff harder like:

- Maintain multiple development environments - Publish new packages - Build binary packages - Handle Windows

I think on Ruby you need tools beyond "gem install" to do those as well. The point is how we achieve simplicity while keeping the ability to do those things.

You can just do 'pip install the-package' in python if you aren't using a virtual environment.

Ruby does have the equivalent of virtual environments, using RVM or rbenv (similar but different tools), to solve the same problems as in Python.