I don’t really see this ever making its way into Ruby, but it’s a compelling idea, nevertheless :)

Anyone curious, the posted original was:

 
class Range
  def rand
    Kernel.rand(GAP.last - GAP.first) + GAP.first
  end
end

I haven’t yet worked on a project large enough to shoot itself in the foot with mixins, partly because Ruby code tends to be short. But I guess I can imagine how it would happen, especially if you had bad coders.

I have adopted this practice too, to the extent that most of my personal projects have a file extensions.rb that contains just this kind of convenience methods. Large parts of these files tend to migrate across projects as well. I should start thinking about keeping them somewhere centralised, perhaps.

It’s a pity that this technique becomes somewhat unusable for larger projects or libraries, because in a way this isn’t any better than global namespace pollution…
Something like local mixins would be a pretty cool concept, but probably a bit too mind-bending for our own good :)