Racket development tips.md

• Use xrepl when developing outside DrRacket. Set to automatically start up whenever racket is run at command line.
• racket-mode for emacs development
• #lang envy for environment variable configuration
• #lang debug for "printf debugging"
• #lang sweet-exp for prettifying requires and provides, or other simple pieces of code where parens are just noise (can be partially used in a file, doesn't need to apply to the whole file)
• #lang reprovide for modules that just require and provide other modules to group them together
• Use #lang racket/base instead of #lang racket for libraries, packages, and other re-usable pieces of code, to reduce dependencies
• Use the -lib packages of libraries for applications to reduce dependencies
• When designing libraries, avoid documenting and exposing subcollections to allow more flexibility for the library's code to shift around
• When designing libraries, stick non-exposed modules into a /private subcollection to make any code depending on internals stick out like a sore thumb
• Typed racket where possible, contracts always barring exceptional circumstances
• Use Travis CI with Greg Hendershott's travis ci script for racket
• Use doc-coverage to enforce all exports of a library are documented (great if you run the test in CI, contributors will have to provide docs to add features)
• Use cover with CI and a service like Coveralls or Codecov (support soon!) for test coverage
• Use deprecated from scribble/manual for deprecation warnings in docs
• Use jack-scribble-examples (once I've stabilized it) for examples in docs
• Put new features in a library foo in an unstable/foo collection before moving them into the main collection. This is useful for serious libraries where you care about backwards compatibility