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.