I see many technical solutions listed out, but I didn't see any answers to your 'Isn't that enough?' question.
As some of you know the first prog. lang. I learned was Arc, but since then I've been working with Clojure and have been really happy to have namespaces.
For starters:
* I don't need to spend brain power coming up with stupid hacked names to prevent collisions. I can use the ones that flow naturally.
* I'm not a fan of having gobs of documentation, so for me a defvar or fn name should be meaningful yet as short as possible, I can achieve this with namespaces and lose this otherwise.
* I think having the option for a few lines at the top of your files to represent namespace management is far less a problem than making your code less readable.
Also, for example, using namespaces one could normalize[1] much of the code between Arc and Clojure, such that converting programs over becomes a cinch:
i.e. You could create an arc library in Clojure that overrides Clojure names:
In the end name-spacing, even though some consider it boilerplate, is a valuable tool for code management and it would be nice to see it come to arc.
[1] Obviously some arc sugar will not covert over, but you could write a program in arc knowing in advance what semantics to avoid, making the conversion work, or at least lessening the impact.
[edit:] Lol, I forgot 'remove', is actually 'rem' in arc, but you get the point .
"I see many technical solutions listed out, but I didn't see any answers to your 'Isn't that enough?' question."
:) I noticed that as well. Thanks for the writeup.
"..having the option for a few lines at the top of your files.."
Oh, I'd love the option. It's good to have the ability to rename declarations, but I don't need it all the time. The common case isn't collisions. The common case is just one definition to a name, and when I use the name I want the definition. It seems a false economy to foist verbosity on the common case.
More concretely, I want to phrase your examples as:
(use arc.core :exclude [remove])
No need for a namespace declaration inside arc.core, or in the caller.
Or an interactive session like this:
> (load "a")
> (load "b")
warning: b.foo shadows a.foo ; now a.foo isn't available
> (rename b.foo :to b_foo) ; a.foo becomes available again
It's really interesting to see languages that started out extremely dynamic copy namespaces and turn gradually more static. The idea of inference seems to not have rippled into namespaces. PLT added modules at some point, and suddenly you can't load a module or require a non-module, and to be able to rename declarations you had to require. every. single. module you ever use within every single module.
In Clojure the core names from the core language are automatically imported into all/any namespaces(even the default one 'user'). So you don't have to use them, you can just do the same thing arc does -> (load-file "filename.clj").
And you can choose to incorporate name-spacing only when you need to.
That being said, once you start crafting projects having more than one file you will end up adding a bare min namespace, since it's just actually easier than load-file:
i.e.
(ns myprog.core)
does the same as:
(load-file "/myprog/core.arc")
only it creates the names in the namespace 'myprog.core'.
Interactively at the REPL you can switch between namespaces,
user=>(ns mynamespace)
mynamespace=>
Or you can just load all your library files into a single namespace.
Since Clojure core libraries are already loaded, my example actually had to exclude the 'remove' causing a little bit of boilerplate:
(ns arc.core
(:refer-clojure :exclude [remove]))
but, you can easily stack the names of interest:
.i.e to add more items to exclude...
(ns arc.core
(:refer-clojure :exclude [remove find others]))
The same can be said if you want to selectively import:
As opposed to loading everything from some extra library:
(ns myprog.core
(:use somelibrary.core))
In my mind it's really slick, and there's a plethora of options to manage them, should you need/want to.
> 'No need for a namespace declaration inside arc.core, or in the caller'.
None, but as stated above - you typically have one since it's easier.
[edit: None, assuming you choose to use load-file (load-file "arc/core.clj") which loads the code into the default namespace, or where ever you ran load-file)
[edit: yeah lein is doing the load for me, but you can still just use load if you like. To run as a script Clojure uses 'java -cp ....', so your files need to be on your classpath location. It's been a long time, since I bothered with that way.]
> Can I use all its declarations as just find and not arc.find?
Yup (well, find is actually taken by clojure core, so you need to exclude it if you wanted your own version, but for everything else, which I believe was the intent of your question, you're golden).
