As part of tidying up my code and separating it into individually digestible libraries rather than a big ball of mud, I've started a GitHub organization called "Lathe." [1]
You might be familiar with Lathe as the name of my Arc utility libraries and their namespace system[2]. The concept behind the name Lathe was always related to trying to "smooth out" the language I was working in. (And I think originally it was directly related to the language Blade I was trying to design and build; I was smoothing out Arc to get it closer to Blade, or something.)
And at one point I started putting JavaScript utilities in Lathe as well. At the time, I thought stuffing Arc utilities and JavaScript utilities into the same repo was for the best, because I figured they might interact with each other somehow (e.g. one of them loading the other through an FFI of some kind). They never quite did. Even when I started putting Racket utilities in Lathe, I didn't ever invoke them from Arc or vice versa.
I'm finally breaking Lathe apart into multiple libraries, all under the "Lathe" GitHub organization[1]. I've got these so far:
- Lathe Comforts for Racket (little day-to-day utilities)
- Lathe Morphisms for Racket (algebraic or category-theoretic constructions)
- Lathe Ordinals for Racket (ordinal arithmetic)
Lathe Morphisms and Lathe Ordinals weren't ever part of the original Lathe repo[2]; they're all-new. And there isn't really that much to Lathe Morphisms yet anyhow; its design is still unstable at the most basic levels as I learn more about category theory.
Anyhow, you may notice "for Racket" is part of the library name, and the full GitHub repository name is something like lathe/lathe-comforts-for-racket. I'm organizing Lathe so that it's reasonable to add in libraries like "Lathe Comforts for JavaScript," "Lathe Comforts for Arc," and so on, without having to come up with a creative name for each and every library. :-p
Since Racket has a package repository, I drop the "for Racket" from the name of the library when I publish it there, so people can simply run `raco install lathe-comforts`. I would do the same thing if I were publishing a "for JavaScript" library on npm.
Anyhow, this blog post is a journal of the way I broke out Lathe Ordinals into its own library this week.
