What do you mean FUD? Maybe you've got your own way of doing things that works well so far for you with your current projects, but a ton of people don't live with the same experience, and when they do reach a comfortable spot, it's only comfortable until they move to a new set of projects or company.

I'm saying that, while a top-tier, software-as-a-service company might have a development environment that is hard to bootstrap -- because of all the ancillary things that run alongside the "monolith" -- your generalization that "Rails" makes a mess of a development machine is FUD. The Ruby/Rails part of this equation is not the issue. As always, YMMV and TACMA.

I didn't say Rails makes a mess of a dev machine. What I'm saying is that every project makes different sort of assumptions about how it's brought up in a dev environment, and these assumptions vary wildly between projects and stacks, and usually the older and more prominent a project is, odds are it will have the most unexpected impact on anyone's machine. This is going to be true for any combination of libraries, frameworks and programming languages.

I'm not mounting an attack on Rails. Rails' fine.

(Edit) I can't answer your reply. It seems there's many ways to read the quote you brought up. I'm clarifying that the meaning I intended wasn't an attack on Rails. Take it as you will. I'm a bit confused why my original comment, which I meant as a positive-to-neutral tone, is being perceived so negatively.

> I didn't say Rails makes a mess of a dev machine.

I literally quoted you saying that in my first post. But hey, what do I know?

Codespaces doesn't magically solve that problem. You have to put in the work and ongoing maintenance effort either way.

Yeah but if before we had MxN complexity:

  - M: number of devs with their own machine
  - N: number of projects with their own way of bringing up dev env

Using stuff like Codespace reduces M to 1.

There are dozens of tools and strategies to reduce M to 1. Codespaces is just one of them.

Codespaces has the disadvantage of turning you into a renter.