That's a local effect that can be avoided once you know the sematincs of the language. The issue with abused metaprogramming and monkey patching is that it results in global effects that are hard to track.
I would prefer to review a messy 50kloc php project over a messy 50kloc ruby project.
I was citing it as a good thing versus PHP's (and Perl's) "foo" == 0;// true behavior. I believe that still to be the right thing despite other issues Ruby has.
