The author claims that monkey-patching private methods to expose them publicly is representative of Ruby's beauty, and specifically:
"... later upgrades to the library don’t need to be re-fixed: the one-time patch will automatically get re-applied by application code automatically!"
Anyone who fails to realize how monkey-patching can and will break both subtly and catastrophically across library upgrades has no business advising anyone regarding language choices.
[Edit] I hate April Fool's Day. Depressingly, the author's satire is so subtly aligned with common arguments as to so thoroughly fool.
Just because it's a satire doesn't mean the title in incorrect. I would argue that Ruby is, in fact, the future for the same reason that Python is the future.
As for monkey patching, yes, it's ill-advised in general just as global scope and gotos are ill-advised for similar reasons. However, monkey patching is a powerful feature if used responsibly as Chad Fowler has noted ("The Virtues of Monkey Patching"):
Now admittedly, not every programmer is as competent or responsible as Chad Fowler or the programming world would be a very different place but the point is there's a right way and a wrong way to do it.
Werner Schuster's article on InfoQ ("Ruby's Open Classes - Or: How Not To Patch Like A Monkey") has more good advice on how to do it the right way:
As noted in Werner Schuster's article, many languages (such as C# or Scala) do support type-safe, non-ambiguous, non-conflicting extension of existing classes, demonstrating that extension of existing classes can be safely implemented and does not require the use of dangerous monkey-patching.
dealing with the type system in scala can be a pain and is a hit to productivity in the early stages. The question is if the hit in the early stages leads to more productivity in the later stages. I'm not convinced that it does.
I've done a lot of ruby, and I've had monkey patching bite me a few times. However, fixing the problem was never that hard (two days max) and is clearly overshadowed by the productivity gained from the power ruby gave my teams.
How can one effectively argue against an entirely subjective judgment of difficulty in terms of dealing with a type system?
Anecdotally, I find that leveraging functional language programming features coupled with type inference and polymorphism leads to considerable productivity gains as code correctness can be ensured through judicious use of types -- without requiring extensive testing or programmer effort -- while excess verbosity can be eliminated through the use of FP features such as type-safe anonymous functions, currying, etc.
How do you deal with excess verbosity in C#? I know this is a separate argument from the monkey patching issue but for me the conciseness and elegance of the Ruby syntax versus C# is the primary reason to choose Ruby.
I find monkeypatching happens because the framework doesn't utilize proper baseline OO techniques. By "baseline" I'm excluding mixins. I have rarely found a case where mixins do a better job over well factored inheritance. I don't think mixins are "evil". Just over utilized and inheritance heavily underutilized in Ruby.
You're lucky that in those cases you were able to recover in only two days. The time it takes to get back on track can be proportional to the size of the project so imagine if you were dealing with an enterprise system written in and monkey patched in Ruby and you had a similar problem. Depending on your luck, you might get back on track or you might end up having a lot of extra time to work on your resume.
Why? Because of monkey patching, syntax, performance, the community or some other reason such as you prefer Python or have an intuitive, ineffable and unexpressable disklike of the language or because Matz is from Japan and they bombed Pearl Harbor?
I have very few issues with Ruby as a language, in general it let's me get from thought to working code quicker than any other language I've used. Honestly the largest issues I've run into with Ruby typically deal with people trying to be too clever.
Ruby certainly provides a lot of ways for people who want to look incredibly clever to hang themselves and anyone using their code. I typically avoid libraries or frameworks where clever code is the norm (I'm looking at you Rails), and because of this I tend not to have too many problems.
It's certainly not perfect, and I've been frustrated by bad error messages, stupid type system mistakes, etc. But I've found that those issues simply replace issues in other languages.
I still feel that Ruby gets me from Thought to Code quicker, and for the kind of projects I typically do, that's worth dodging a couple of warts.
-> "the largest issues I've run into with Ruby typically deal with people trying to be too clever"
I agree with you about Thought-to-Code and even though I argued in favor of monkey patching earlier, the willingness to use it without discipline has raised a red flag for me and is the biggest sign of this "too cleverness" that you're referring to (at least for me). If Ruby becomes the new Java, maintaining irresponsibly monkey patched legacy systems could be a nightmare for the enterprise developer in the years to come.
I love Ruby. I love that code can be so short and yet easily readable. It might be slower and perhaps more memory-hungry than other languages, but for my needs that's usually not an issue.
What I do miss are good, well documented, stable libraries. For example, I currently process RSS/Atom feeds with FeedTools, whose own creator says he's tired of maintaining (I totally understand him and am extremely thankful for the time he put into it). I assume if there were more people coding Ruby, there would be a better chance someone would step up and take his place. So, having a community that is more welcoming to newcomers would eventually benefit us all.
By "open to newcomers" I don't mean that Ruby-celebs should stop posting snarky comments at each other in their blogs. This is pretty negilible. I mean stuff like having better documentation, for example, online, free, in googleable format (rather than screencasts or print books). IMHO PHP3 annotated online docs back in 1999 were significantly more usable than what Rails has to offer now.
martoo on the equivalent Reddit post had the best thing to say about this:
"There needs to be a special term for an attempt at an April Fool's Day Joke, which is in all of its points true and then ends up looking like a joke made by an author at his own expense."
"... later upgrades to the library don’t need to be re-fixed: the one-time patch will automatically get re-applied by application code automatically!"
Anyone who fails to realize how monkey-patching can and will break both subtly and catastrophically across library upgrades has no business advising anyone regarding language choices.
[Edit] I hate April Fool's Day. Depressingly, the author's satire is so subtly aligned with common arguments as to so thoroughly fool.