[racket] Complexity Failure: Third Attempt, Third Time Fail

Well today was I'd say my was third attempt to refactor an accumulation of
code into some sort of structure, create documentation, clean raco setup
and Planet publication.  Third time fail.  And fail badly.

Granted say +60% is on me, but ... some stuff should just work.

In my opinion the combinatorial explosion of Racket features intersecting
with a lacking in modularity pile of functionality results in robustness
failure where facets are coming together.[1]

Creating a library, documenting it, publishing it should be drop dead
simple and just work. And it probably does, for simple things, if you're
careful.  Probably.

So ... I'm devoting the rest of the week, all of it, to isolating and
submitting core bread and butter bugs that are stymieing that goal until
the process works smoothly, without kludges, hacks, compromises and
work-arounds.

I'm going to start with hunting down one that's been happening for long
while now, what are the conditions that cause a simple 'require' to fail
and why for the love of god does the compiler refuse to tell you where the
require was and which module was requiring it?

I love haystack diving and recursive grepping 10,000 lines of code in
search of what causes a simple require resolve error as much as anyone, but
sometimes you just want the darn compiler to cut you some slack and tell
you a) the error specifics in an intelligible manner b) the source line
that caused it, thank you very much.

Don't get me wrong there is so much amazing stuff in Racket.   I can't
think of a single substantive programming paradigm not contained in Racket
or any aspect of the development process not attempted by Racket, all
engineered to the nth ... yet, I think the philosopher Bilbo Baggins said
it best, “Racket feels thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over
too much bread.”

Sorry for the vent ...

Ray

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#Conceptual_integrity
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