Actively encourage? There are only a handful of libraries that actively monkey patch the core classes. ActiveSupport, RubyGems, extlib, and uhm.... I don't know

Actively encourage? There are only a handful of libraries that actively monkey patch the core classes. ActiveSupport, RubyGems, extlib, and uhm.... I don't know anything else. If anything most of the Ruby blog posts on monkey patching always warn programmers that it should be done with care. If you're so afraid of incompetent developers money patching things so that they break, why aren't you afraid that they write Java* code that spawns 2 million threads, crashing the system? Or code that deletes the hard drive? There are plenty of easy ways to break a program besides monkey patching. * With "Java" I mean whatever your favorite language is that you think will prevent incompetent developers from doing stupid things.