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Did they ever fix the arbitrary nature of monkey patching where last in wins? I've not touched ruby in years (and never seriously after I read up on how prevale

Did they ever fix the arbitrary nature of monkey patching where last in wins? I've not touched ruby in years (and never seriously after I read up on how prevalent MP was).

RangerScience 5y ago
Sort of. They introduced "refinements" as the thing you're supposed to do instead of monkeypatching, but AFAIK it doesn't get wide-spread usage. IME you don't usually do monkey-patching, although there are circumstances where it makes A LOT of sense (usually test suites). It's one of those sharp knives - safe if you plan out using it, dangerous if you don't.
jacobsenscott 5y ago
Yes, they added refinements several years ago. That said I've been programming rails for probably 10 years, and I never see anyone use refinements, and I can count on one hand the number of times monkey patching has actually been a problem for me personally. I'm sure there are cases where it bit someone hard, but this is one of those things that a theoretically bad, but never seem to really have any impact in practice.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  I have to maintain code that was written by a developer who has long since left the space. He monkeypatched in stuff like Hash#dig years before it landed in ruby with a slightly different API and blew up the codebase. Since he was a pretty clever developer and had some wide experience in other languages he would monkeypatch in useful stuff from other languages -- but by doing that collisions with the core language are actually pretty frequent. Many people have the same clever idea when its really just copying some pattern that was successful in some other language. Awhile back I gutted the code and ripped out 60% of it, including all the monkeypatching and the maintanence burden on every ruby release dropped sharply. (And I'm assuming we're talking about the more polite kind of Monkeypatching where you're adding methods to global classes that are net-new, not the practice of opening up a class and scribbling over methods that you didn't write and replacing behavior, where should you should always mental picture your SemVer contract being lit on fire)

Did they ever fix the arbitrary nature of monkey patching where last in wins? I've not touched ruby in years (and never seriously after I read up on how prevalent MP was).

RangerScience 5y ago

Sort of. They introduced "refinements" as the thing you're supposed to do instead of monkeypatching, but AFAIK it doesn't get wide-spread usage. IME you don't usually do monkey-patching, although there are circumstances where it makes A LOT of sense (usually test suites). It's one of those sharp knives - safe if you plan out using it, dangerous if you don't.

jacobsenscott 5y ago

Yes, they added refinements several years ago. That said I've been programming rails for probably 10 years, and I never see anyone use refinements, and I can count on one hand the number of times monkey patching has actually been a problem for me personally. I'm sure there are cases where it bit someone hard, but this is one of those things that a theoretically bad, but never seem to really have any impact in practice.

lamontcg 5y ago
I have to maintain code that was written by a developer who has long since left the space. He monkeypatched in stuff like Hash#dig years before it landed in ruby with a slightly different API and blew up the codebase. Since he was a pretty clever developer and had some wide experience in other languages he would monkeypatch in useful stuff from other languages -- but by doing that collisions with the core language are actually pretty frequent. Many people have the same clever idea when its really just copying some pattern that was successful in some other language. Awhile back I gutted the code and ripped out 60% of it, including all the monkeypatching and the maintanence burden on every ruby release dropped sharply. (And I'm assuming we're talking about the more polite kind of Monkeypatching where you're adding methods to global classes that are net-new, not the practice of opening up a class and scribbling over methods that you didn't write and replacing behavior, where should you should always mental picture your SemVer contract being lit on fire)