I am thinking about an addition to the syntax of the ns macro: the :as option on the namespace itself. (ns my-ns :as here)

That would help in situations where the user has to type the fully qualified name of a Var defined locally .. but I am not sure about when/where this use case happens.

maybe that's a bad idea

There are none

There are no places your have access to the alias that you can't just use the unqualified name of the var

Because both of those things really on the same thing, the value of *ns*

I was thinking that in some cases it could simplify quoting, but .. no.

@vincent.cantin you already have

::foo `foo 

Just noticed that serialized-require is documented in new core functions for Clojure 1.10 https://github.com/clojure/clojure/blob/master/changes.md#26-other-new-functions-in-core but it ended up being private. Probably should not be listed in the changes doc?