DIP 1030--Named Arguments--Community Review Round 1 Discussion

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 11:08:59 PM MST Mike Parker via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> This is the feedback thread for the first round of Community
> Review for DIP 1030, "Named Arguments":
>
> https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/44b0d4ec0da6a2e797ede748fb1e81cd6db1037
> 1/DIPs/DIP1030.md
>
> Here in the discussion thread, you are free to discuss anything
> and everything related to the DIP. Express your support or
> opposition, debate alternatives, argue the merits... in other
> words, business as usual.
>
> However, if you have any specific feedback for how to improve the
> the proposal itself, then please post it in the feedback thread.
> The feedback thread will be the source for the review summary I
> write at the end of this review round. I will post a link to that
> thread immediately following this post. Just be sure to read and
> understand the Reviewer Guidelines before posting there:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/docs/guidelines-reviewers.md
>
> The review period will end at 11:59 PM ET on February 20, or when
> I make a post declaring it complete. Discussion in this thread
> may continue beyond that point.
>
> At the end of Round 1, if further review is deemed necessary, the
> DIP will be scheduled for another round of Community Review.
> Otherwise, it will be queued for the Final Review and Formal
> Assessment.
>
> Please stay on topic here. I will delete posts that are
> completely off topic.

Well, I'll say again that I don't like the idea of having named arguments in
the language, because it makes the parameter names part of the API,
resulting in yet more bikeshedding and yet another thing that can't be
changed without breaking existing code. Once in a while, named arguments may
be useful, but for the most part, they're useful because a function has way
too many parameters, in which case, the function should have been designed
differently.

Unfortunately, since it's Walter who created the DIP, and a number of people
do like the idea of named arguments, I expect that some form of this will
make it in, but I still think that it's a bad idea.

- Jonathan M Davis