Watched some MountainWest RubyConf 2014 talks and noticed an interesting theme. Many dynamic programming environments back in the old days used to be self-contained VM images, e.g. SmallTalk, GemStone/S. One could checkpoint, modify, and ship these images wholesale and have it up and running with very little effort. Fast forward to now and I'm still using Make files to configure and install binaries. What happened?