Guiltless monkeypatching with UUID

1. Example in Ruby

Feeling guilty about monkeypatching? Then free yourself from fear of name collisions and peer ridicule by naming your monkeypatched constructs with universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) and be finally at peace with your inner, monkeypatching self!

uuidgen | sed 'y/-/_/; s/^/_/'

The above command generates a UUID that conforms to /^\w+$/ and is therefore ready for use in mainstream programming languages today.

Example in Ruby

Although you would typically monkeypatch in Ruby like this:

class Array
  alias __inspect__ inspect
  def inspect
    "<MonkeyPatchedArray:#{__inspect__}>"
  end
end

[1, 2, 3].inspect #=> "<MonkeyPatchedArray:[1, 2, 3]>"

You can achieve the same effect, without guilt, like this:

class Array
  alias _fba86586_e89d_4ed4_ba5c_395776a674b3 inspect
  def inspect
    "<GuiltlesslyMonkeyPatchedArray(#{
      _fba86586_e89d_4ed4_ba5c_395776a674b3
    })>"
  end
end

[1, 2, 3].inspect #=> "<GuiltlesslyMonkeyPatchedArray([1, 2, 3])>"