One of the big wins for BSD has been the packaging system.  It’s very easy to use ports or pkgsrc to download all the dependencies for a given application automatically, and even Linux tools like yum or apt-get handle this nowadays.

Ruby, Perl, Python, and etc. have the disadvantage that if you write a interpreted script that uses libraries not in the standard distribution of that language, users of that script need to perform additional software installation, assuming they have access to do so, just to run that script.  This is a major disadvantage compared to “compiled” software.  To overcome this, additional steps that turn the script and needed libraries into a single executable are required.

‘_why the lucky stiff’ has a solution that matches: Shoes, a Ruby GUI toolkit, goes and gets any needed libraries as part of its startup process. Why didn’t someone think of this 10 years ago so that it could be commonplace?