> Clearly we need something in between the fauxpen-access of journals and the wilde west of the blogosphere, probably.

I think GP's min-distance solution would work well as an arxiv paper that is never submitted for publication.

A curated list of never-published papers, with comments by users, makes sense in this context. Not sure that arxiv itself is a good place, but something close to it in design, with user comments and response-papers could be workable.

Something like RFC, but with rich content (not plain-text) and focused on things like GP published (code techniques, tricks, etc).

Could even call it "circulars on computer programming" or "circulars on software engineering", etc.

PS. I ran an experiment some time back, putting something on arxiv instead of github, and had to field a few comments about "this is not novel enough to be a paper" and my responses were "this is not a publishable paper, and I don't intend to submit it anywhere". IOW, this is not a new or unique problem.

(See the thread here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44290315)