Ruby does supply the private class method.
Ruby monkey patch private method.
Or perhaps you need to monkey patch a class you own.
But just like monkey patching alias method chain got overused and its problems started to become obvious.
This gem calculates descriptive statistics including measures of central tendency e g.
Therefore a monkey patch might break code which doesn t expect the extended behavior and multiple monkey patches for the same class might cause conflicts to solve these problems refinements provide a way to extend classes locally.
Alias method chain led to my first patches to gems which led to my first pull requests which led to my first open source contributions.
Mean median mode dispersion e g.
Patches go into lib core.
So you have to have a way to quickly learn those changes when you jump into a new codebase.
Monkey patching is a powerful feature of ruby however it affects globally in a program.
Rearmed is a collection of plugins which are driven by making life easier coding more natural.
Range and quartiles and spread e g variance and standard deviation.
The reason your original approach doesn t work is that instead of monkey patching array class you implemented a new stylable array class note the namespace.
Ruby has a very beautiful syntax and so it can be tempting to monkey patch a class to turn some ugly method call into something that is more readable.
For example you often see monkey patches that simply add a convenience method that has no side effect.
We could monkey patch array and.
I mostly follow rails monkey patching convention.
You have to know where your monkey patches live.
The method names it generates are confusing which makes errors hard to find and debug.
When you monkey patch core classes you add to the core ruby apis.
A collection of helpful methods and monkey patches for arrays hash enumerables strings objects dates in ruby.
Another reason to question the def self method notation is the ability to define private and protected methods.
If you re running ruby 2 0 and you don t want to monkey patch array globally you could create custom class that inherits from array.