Having done a bit of development in both, I found I got productive in Go quicker than with Ruby. With Ruby, there's many ways to do the same thing. That might be great when you're experienced with the language, but for someone starting out it can be daunting. The compexity of installing RVM put me off also - I was never able to install it on Linux properly so ended up using the version that came with the Ubuntu package manager, which was an old version.