As Ruby programmers, I think we enjoy the ease and power of being able to extend any core Ruby class. As our ruby-fu grows, we pick up some tricks to have Hash’s and Struct’s to do our bidding, monkeypatched or not. So naturally we start collecting extensions. Sometimes they’re cool enough to blog about, sometimes you find out a week later that Ruby’s stdlib or activesupport already does it better. Eventually collecting enough of them, you decide to gem or github them because you want to share what you’ve learned. You want others to use it. Heck, maybe even get feedback on them. So when releasing them, why do we force monkeypatching?

 class Object
   def awesome_instance_method
   end
   def self.awesomer_class_method
   end
 end

Why do this when it’s easy to do the same without monkeypatching?

 
 module Awesome
   module Object
     def awesome_instance_method
     end

     module ClassMethods
       def awesomer_class_method
       end
     end
   end   
 end

 # In a separate file that you will require:
 Object.send :include, Awesome::Object
 Object.send :extend, Awesome::Object::ClassMethods

No, I’m not trying to reignite monkeypatch debates. Rather, just hoping that as a community, we can release monkeypatch-agnostic extensions and let the programmer decide when to monkeypatch.

So why do I think everybody monkeypatches their extensions? Take a look at some of the Ruby extension libraries out there:

• activesupport
• facets
• extlib
• merb-extlib
• extensions
• awesomeness
• hubahuba
• quality_extensions
• ruby-nuggets
• my.rb
• mini_facet

And there’s still more on github …
Of the above extensions, ActiveSupport is the ONLY one that doesn’t force monkeypatching:

 gem 'activesupport'
 require 'active_support/core_ext/array/access'
 class My; class Array < ::Array; end; end
 My::Array.send :include, ActiveSupport::CoreExtensions::Array::Access 

So can we share our extensions without monkeypatching?