On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 1:25 PM, James Britt <james.britt / gmail.com> wrote:
>  It's not that these claims are entirely untrue, it's just that, in real
>  life, most people simply do not encounter the  alleged problems.
>
>  Code that is poorly written or does not play well with others tends to
>  get discarded.

Except that I'm working in the real world, and I run into these
problems practically every day.  Read through some Rails plugin code
sometime - nearly every significant, popular Rails plugin does what it
does by re-opening classes.  Probably because this is the coding style
that Rails demonstrates and encourages.  Now we can argue about this
being a Rails problem rather than a Ruby one, but again, that's where
people are learning the language these days.

If you have the luxury of working on small projects with few
developers and the time to develop everything in-house rather than
relying on third-party gems and plugins, that's great.  But I and the
people I know *are* encountering these problems.  And in the majority
of cases, they are *completely* *avoidable*.  And there is usually
nothing about the problem that makes a monkey-patch a desirable or
even an easier way to implement the feature - it's simply done that
way because that's how everyone else is doing it.

-- 
Avdi