Martijn Pieters: 20 Years of Hacking the Web

codementor.io

23 pointsweitingliu5 comments

>You can’t just give them a piece of code and say, “this solves your problem.” I prefer to be able to tell them why this solves the problem.

Matrjin pedantically tried to close one of my SO questions (no one else voted to close it though). I consider him one of the overzealous moderators that bring the quality of SO down. Didn't help me solve a problem at all.

Now I really want to know the story behind the name 'monkey patching'

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_patch (references to footnotes are from original site):

The term monkey patch seems to have come from an earlier term, guerrilla patch, which referred to changing code sneakily – and possibly incompatibly with other such patches – at runtime.[2] The word guerrilla, homophonous with gorilla (or nearly so), became monkey, possibly to make the patch sound less intimidating.[2] An alternative etymology is that it refers to “monkeying about” with the code (messing with it).

Thanks :)

I've actually written about that on Programmers: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/235992/55400. The term was coined before Python Labs joined Zope Corp though (IIRC).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com