À la carte can be now used figuratively to describe someone who picks some things out of a larger set, e.g., an à la carte Catholic who (conveniently) believes in some aspects of the religion, but not others. À la carte television refers to customers paying for just channels they want, rather they having to pay for a whole (cable) service.

I would much rather have a "cosine" module than a "trigonometry" module because chances are good I only need a small fraction of the utilities provided by the larger trig module.

Second, I don't agree that there are too many small modules. In fact, I wish every common function existed as its own module. Even the maintainers of utility libraries like Underscore and Lodash have realized the benefits of modularity and allowed you to install individual utilities from their library as separate modules. From where I sit that seems like a smart move. Why should I import the entirety of Underscore just to use one function? Instead I'd rather see more "function suites" where a bunch of utilities are all published separately but under a namespace or some kind of common name prefix to make them easier to find. The way Underscore and Lodash have approached this issue is perfect. It gives consumers of their packages options and flexibility while still letting people like Dave import the whole entire library if that's what they really want to do.