According to Wikipedia, a monkey patch is:
a way to extend or modify the runtime
code of dynamic languages […]
without altering the original source
code.
The following statement from the same entry confused me:
In Ruby, the term monkey patch was
misunderstood to mean any dynamic
modification to a class and is often
used as a synonym for dynamically
modifying any class at runtime.
I would like to know the exact meaning of monkey patching in Ruby. Is it doing something like the following, or is it something else?
class String
def foo
"foo"
end
end
Best Answer
The best explanation I heard for Monkey patching/Duck-punching is by Patrick Ewing in RailsConf 2007