[tbrock]

Yup it's a shame an operating system released as early as this year (mountain lion) came with 1.8.7 because it will be around for quite a while. We recently had to make the difficult decision to continue support of it in a new release because of CentOS, Mountain Lion etc...

At least 2.0.0p195 is indeed in Mavericks.

[ihuman]

Are there people that do programming on macs not use tools like macports or homebrew?

[tbrock]

You are right, I'm pretty sure everyone who is a professional programmer uses homebrew, it's amazing.

However, coding to 1.8.7 lets those who aren't hardcore rubyists currently enjoy a gem they may otherwise not be able to without having to deal with or even know about rvm or rbenv.

[UNIXgod]

There's gentoo/alt and fink which predates DarwinPorts. I'm sure there is even a pkgsrc user out there. I've occasionally used this one called make. It's sort of a meta language to homebeer. In fact it comes in two flavors pmake and gmake. =P

[X-Istence]

You forgot bsdmake ... which up until OS X ML was still available on OS X.

[UNIXgod]

I didn't forget it. That is pmake my friend =)