I think it’s a royal pain in the butt to be cleaning up the accumulated cruft of the monkey patches other people have added to your long-lived and massive Rails

I think it’s a royal pain in the butt to be cleaning up the accumulated cruft of the monkey patches other people have added to your long-lived and massive Rails app. I’ve done it, and it sucks. But it’s a wonderful, powerful tool to have in the toolbox, when used sparingly. I wonder how much of the pain of monkey patching could be partially explained through the way that large companies maintain (or don’t maintain) their codebases? In my experience code is often hard to maintain because of a lack of continuity, context, and support from an employer to actually do the maintenance. In that world, monkey patching is an extra-special kind of hell. I wonder sometimes if we might all feel less strongly about monkey patching if we had more time to care for the code we write.