Pitfalls
Carelessly written or poorly documented monkey patches can lead to problems:
- They can lead to upgrade problems when the patch makes assumptions about the patched object that are no longer true; if the product you have changed changes with a new release it may very well break your patch. For this reason monkey patches are often made conditional, and only applied if appropriate.
- If two modules attempt to monkey-patch the same method, one of them (whichever one runs last) "wins" and the other patch has no effect, unless monkeypatches are written with a pattern like
alias_method_chain. - They create a discrepancy between the original source code on disk and the observed behaviour that can be very confusing to anyone unaware of the patches' existence.
Even if monkey patching isn't used, some see a problem with the availability of the feature, since the ability to use monkey patching in a programming language is incompatible with enforcing strong encapsulation, as required by the object-capability model, between objects.
Read more about this topic: Monkey Patch
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