I'd argue that writing Chef in Ruby (and Erlang) was absolutely to its detriment. Yeah, it was popular. It was also a debugging and scaling nightmare (not that Opscode helped that any).

In fact one of the reasons I rage quit megacorp for a second time was that I was required to use an Enterprise Chef instance that would log people out at random every 0-3600 seconds. I could throw plenty of deserved shade at my coworkers but Opscode didn't understand their product any better and I wasted more than enough time on conference calls with them.