Funny, I was just thinking how much cleaner a supposedly-horrid monkey-patch would make his example in Ruby. thing = some_dict[my_object.get_foobar_handler()

Funny, I was just thinking how much cleaner a supposedly-horrid monkey-patch would make his example in Ruby. thing = some_dict[my_object.get_foobar_handler()].get_only_element() self-documents the purpose of the operation and its assumption much more legibly than the typo-esque (thing,) = ... in my opinion.