All true. It is mostly related to human perception IMO; if things are separated in “apps”, “bundles”, “module collections”, “class libraries” etc. then us the people think that bundle to be a semantically isolated unit – which is true often enough but many times it isn’t because it’s simply a device to make the life of the code organizer a bit easier.
To reiterate part of my above comments: for most devs I ever met – even the juniors and the interns – it instinctively makes sense not to breach boundaries where you have a small mechanical hurdle before doing so. Thus I try hard in my work to exploit such brain bugs (or hacks or if you will) in order to make people play nicely with my code. Saves time, saves unnecesary discussions, and works most of the time. And when it doesn’t, I can explain why I do things the way I do – in 2 minutes.
In my experience it definitely does draw the said bright line but we come from different backgrounds and societes so that’s surely a factor in it as well.
As for sharing non-code resources, that’s a problem most programming languages still haven’t solved reliably. I’d go radical and make an entirely new OS that has an OS-wide key/value store that can be a file / string / number / whatever and be it read-only 99% of the time (and have additional security attached to it, like who can even view it). I see no reason to maintain configuration or static assets the way we do it right now – deployment with such a new system would be brain-dead easy… But anyway, we can dream.
In Elixir’s case the priv/ directory IMO complicates more things than it solves. But I have no better idea so I am not bad-mouthing it. Often, it’s a good enough mechanism.
