"we want to make sure the damage done by the least skilled programmer on his worst day is strictly contained"

I strongly suggest this kind of risk to be dealt with at the human resources department.

Last time I had to deal with something like this, I suggested firing the HR person who interviewed the then candidate and who did nothing to stop what should have been pretty obvious even to someone without any tech background.

The saddest fact in BFEWAD is that, at the same time Java makes it safe to use 100s of programmers in several continents, you won't need a 100s developers in several continents if you use something less primitive.

As for the monkey patch, there is another technique that prevents it from ruining your week: all automated API tests must pass _before_ the kid in Seoul commits a file.

OTOH, I find Ruby's syntax a bit too flexible and that makes it difficult for me to parse someone else's code unless I know that person very well. When comparing Rails and Django, I prefer the latter. It's just that I can wrap my head around it more easily.