[stevepike]

I think the kind of application here matters a lot, specifically whether you're trying to make a change to a web app or if you're hacking on library code.

In ruby, for example, I can pretty trivially clone any open source gem and run the specs in < 5 minutes. Patching something and opening a PR in under an hour is definitely standard.

On the other hand, getting a development environment running for a company's proprietary web app is often a hassle. Mostly though this isn't because of the language or dependencies, it's because of:

  - Getting all the dependent services up and running (postgres version X, redis Y, whatever else) with appropriate seed data. 
  - Getting access to development secrets

My company (infield.ai) upgrades legacy apps, so we deal with setting up a lot of these. We run them in individual siloed remote developer environments using devcontainers. It works OK once we've configured the service containers.