"... 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.
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"):
http://chadfowler.com/index.cgi/Computing/Programming/Ruby/T...
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:
http://www.infoq.com/articles/ruby-open-classes-monkeypatchi...
"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."
http://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/8966h/ruby_is_the_futu...
