>> In clojure's core.clj, assert-args is marked with ^{:private true}. Why?
>> Seems like something that would be useful in any macro definition, not just
>> the ones in core.clj...
>>
>> A similar argument could be made for several of the other couple of dozen
>> private names in core.clj. They are not, because "useful" is a much lower
>> bar than "core".
>
> That is all fine and good when deciding whether to *add new code to
> core* that will have to be maintained, add to load times, etc.
>
> However, when the code in question is *already in core* I don't see
> "it's not useful enough to enough users" as a valid reason for not
> making it public, which has little added cost (now its API should stay
> stable, but by now it's probably mature enough that it is anyway). If
> it's generally useful, and its remaining private will just lead to
> duplication of functionality as people write their own equivalent
> functions and some of these make their way into various libraries,
> then it's wasteful, inefficient, and possibly a source of bugs to
> *not* make it public. (The "possibly a source of bugs" comes from
> people not using the existing, by now well tested version but rolling
> their own; also, maintaining two redundant copies of some code can
> introduce twice as many bugs down the line.)
Again, the same argument could be made about every other private function in
core, or in any other library. The use of :private communicates something: the
development team that made this does not want to commit to supporting it for
external use.
All of your stated objections would be solved by putting this utility function
in a contrib, as I already suggested: https://github.com/clojure/tools.macro.
See http://clojure.org/contributing for details on joining the development team.
Stu
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