This is especially true if one wishes to push code to production and so on--even with when using Heroku, one still needs to understand the command line side of all of this.
It's also pretty easy to do these days.
It seems like getting a rails app deployed on a server is an important thing for a new person to learn, yet we have Heroku which takes little effort.
We can say this about many of the things ruby/rails and the community has abstracted away for us, but that doesn't mean these tools aren't important in moving forward as a community.
I'm no slouch as a developer. Yet when I've installed RVM on 5+ systems, something _always_ goes wrong, and never in the same way. When it works it works great, but when it doesn't you spend your day bashing your head into a wall.
How will we encourage new programmers to join Rails and the Ruby community when they fail to even get it running?
But doing everything in an app really does have the possibility of hurting one's ability to put code into production, even with heroku.
I'm not interested in Rails.app, but I must correct you on that: it isn't difficult to get a Ruby environment running in most cases.
When you've spent half a day puzzling over why your colleague's new Macbook Air won't build Ruby despite everything seeming to be in order you'll never be so sure of how long setting it up will take.
Eventually, a few years from now, they'll have a better understanding of the full stack, but for now, we want to clear as many possible roadblocks from their way so that they don't either abandon web development or begin using Programming languages which are reasonably Hospitable to People who come from non-traditional backgrounds.
Also "relatively clean system" is an important qualifier. A lot of curious developers won't have one of those, and instead will have to deal with dependency hell and tedious gotchas.
Jumping into learning about the framework is better use of their time upfront.
Also, this is a weird conversation to be having with a dude who has a book for teaching beginners Ruby (http://ruby.bastardsbook.com/ )!
No seriously, though...So many things can easily go wrong with basic Rails...not because Rails is bad, but because Rails has so many features...that if people haven't mastered the art of Googling lines from debug-output or command-line install instructions...then the time they've "saved" by having a push-button solution will be more than spent in the time trying to get off the ground.
But I'm obviously speaking from hindsight...as I've gotten more experienced, I've seen that writing script for minimal apps is more efficient than launching a full-fledged Rails app. However, I may have lost interest in the whole web-app game long ago if I didn't have the chance to play around (clumsily) with Rails 2.2
which is why i had stage file with gentoo prefix instead of all the other stuff, while i was still fulltime osx
http://reza.jelveh.me/2009/05/20/gentoo-on-os-x
i'd be surprised if that stage still works though.