Ruby Refinements Have One Good Use Case

This article is not going to explain what Ruby refinements are. I do not assume that all Rubyists know what they are - in the 10 years since they have been a part of Ruby, real life usages are astonishingly rare. If you are aware that they exist, you still may not be at-all familiar with how they work. There are many good articles available to explain what Ruby refinements are: for a clear and concise explanation of how refinements work, I suggest Starr Horne’s article Understanding Ruby Refinements and Lexical Scope. For a thorough explanation I recommend the transcript of James Adam’s RubyConf talk titled Why Is Nobody Using Refinements?. It’s quite long and in a challenging format to read, but it covers pretty much everything and offers some explanations for why Rubyists are not using them. Whether you commit to reading all that or not, the last paragraph of that transcript offers inspiration for this article:.