More jokes in the IT world: Ruby’s Slow Package Manager, “Gem”

The IT world today is full of jokes. Stuff that is so complicated that many times, you just can’t use it.

Today’s example is Ruby. A neat scripting language basically. But what about installing extensions to Ruby (“gems”)? The Gem tool is well-known to be painfully slow.

I tried to install a gem today (“Mechanize”) — I will use it to web-scrape medium.com — and it really took like a minute or two of computer thought before it even appeared to start doing something.

Oh, and also I needed to install another Debian package (“ruby-dev”) to get this working at all. And so on, and so on…

Do you see this problem, guys? Computers should manage themselves — not have us perform this ridiculous micro-management ritual of complex software issues we really don’t care about.

As a reminder: All JavaX requires you to do is install Java and run one file. Or, on Android, just get the app.

After that, you can run really fancy stuff like this just by choosing the program from the on-screen menu. Here’s a screenshot of that latest desktop recognition experiment: