[plt-dev] a common collection for utility modules

On Nov  7, Ryan Culpepper wrote:
> 
> (Infamous Ryan-Analogy: There are two ways to increase social
> interaction. Encourage people to barge into others' personal spaces,
> or encourage everyone to spend more time in public spaces. I'm going
> for the latter.)

The mistake here is "collection" = "personal space", an equation that
fails in a spectacular way when a collection's owner dumps it and some
victim becomes its new owner.


> > See above.  What needs fixing is for people to start looking
> > beyond their collections -- regardless of a new collection.  (And
> > you can summarize my above concern as: if this is not fixed, then
> > we haven't done anything besides shuffle some code around -- so
> > now people still don't care, and the code is messier.)
> 
> Shuffling code around, when done carefully, is called *organizing*.

The shuffling in this case (at least IIUC) involves taking out random
bits of "looks like it's useful" code and moving it into a big
(parent-less) collection named "unorganized stuff".

[A better attempt at this kind of promotion path would to extend the
chain of `scheme/foo' -> `scheme/private/foo' for some `foo's: add new
list functions into `scheme/list-extra', and have all the extras
documented in an "Unstable Extras" manual.  This way, the unstable
stuff is still organized according to functionality, and since the
code is in `foo-extra', then it's hint for `foo's owner that some
stuff might be good to add -- and if this comes with proper
documentation and tests then it's even easier to add.]

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!