5 ms·

I don't get it. What's bad about incentivizing monkey-patches that don't interfere with other code?

• jonathanwallace 16y ago
  The only thing that comes to mind is its not immediately obvious when source diving when a piece of code has been refined or redefined. IMO, this is the justified cost of flexibility provided by monkey-patching.
  • djacobs 16y ago
    Agreed. Especially if there's no other (clean) option to accomplish what you want. As always, lucid comments are vital for high-level code.
  • jerf 16y ago
    This isn't specifically a problem with monkeypatching. Not knowing what is in scope right now is a generalized problem with object oriented programming. Scoped monkeypatches doesn't really add to the problem, IMHO. (Please note I don't even mean that as a criticism of OO per se. Like everything else, it has costs and benefits, and that is, well, actually a bit of both. Things being hidden from you is annoying, but if you switch to something like Haskell you'll find that everything being shown isn't always entirely cool either.)