Others explained what benefit this has, but it's also helpful to understand the Objective-C heritage here. Swift on Apple platforms run on top of the Objective-

Others explained what benefit this has, but it's also helpful to understand the Objective-C heritage here. Swift on Apple platforms run on top of the Objective-C runtime, making it possible to call Objective-C from Swift and vice versa. Objective-C uses named parameters. An Objective-C class interface might look like @interface MyClass - (NSString *)methodWithParam1:(NSString *)str1 param2:(NSString *)str2; @end And you'd call it like this: NSString *newString = [myClassInstance methodWithParam1:val1 param2:val2]; The Swift translation layer lets you call that like this: let newString = myClassInstance.method(param1: val1, param2: val) And the translation works the other way around too, making Objective-C able to call a subset of Swift methods that use types representable in Objective-C. You need the named parameters to make it work, because the names of the parameters are part of the method name. So it's a nice feature, but it was also necessary for Apple to be able to make Swift an incremental addition to their platform (yes I know of the Python/Ruby/etc translation layers for Objective-C but they're nowhere near as nice.)