I've had to deal with both and monkeypatching isn't the worst thing, because it's static & greppable. foo.method(:bar).source_location ...and you've found

I've had to deal with both and monkeypatching isn't the worst thing, because it's static & greppable. foo.method(:bar).source_location ...and you've found the hack. In java land, third party breakage is just as common and countless times I had to decompile random jars to figure out where the bug was, and resort to strace to figure out which jars were being loaded by misbehaving classloaders. Forking a gem is preferable to monkeypatching, but sometimes this can lead to a chain of forks just to change one line in an indirect dependency, worse than the patch. No, the worst thing is method_missing. Methods that appear nowhere in the source getting invoked, and they only appear at runtime. You can do similar things with InvocationHandler in java but it gets used far, far less.