"If a name's already good, you're not going to change it; if it's bad, you should push that change upstream! (If the name's bad, it's likely that the original author didn't put much time into choosing the name, so I think it would be fairly straightforward to get that merged.)"
Not necessarily. 'Good' and 'bad' are not absolute, they are extremely contextual. A name that is good for a general-use library might be sub-optimal for your application, or vice versa. Subjective taste is also a thing. So while you should certainly send out a pull request for the change, our model of the world shouldn't rely on the change actually getting pushed.
In general it is amazing to me how often a blindingly obvious Pull Request gets rejected or just sits in the queue, untouched. There's lots of different kinds of people out there. Which is why I tend to think more like a barbarian[1] about collaboration: think of other people as islands with whom you might collaborate if the stars align. But don't rely on the collaboration. Be self-sufficient.
"As much as I love this idea of implicit importing, I'm sure the explicit side -- which'll let you change whatever names you like -- will need to be there as well."
I actually interpreted your original post that kicked off this thread as implicit loading since Arc has no notion of modules or import. So the question of changing names did not arise. That seemed like a tangent to the original question.
These seem like separate questions:
1. Should Arc know how to react with implicit symbols?
2. Should Arc provide namespaces?
One the one hand, you can have implicit loading without needing a module/namespace system. On the other hand, I don't see how you can have implicit loading in the presence of namespaces. Without the "from..as" construct how would your system know which library to load a symbol from, if there's a collision?
Summary: even if you have namespaces, you're still going to be doing your own collision-detection if you want implicit loading. What's the point of a module system then?
