I frequently see arguments of the form "X is good; Y doesn't have X; therefore all typeof(Y) are doomed". I don't understand. Didn't you just give a criterion

I frequently see arguments of the form "X is good; Y doesn't have X; therefore all typeof(Y) are doomed". I don't understand. Didn't you just give a criterion for success? Why can't we make a new Y2 that has X? In this case, it doesn't even seem difficult. I've seen multiple stack-based systems that allow items labels. They don't use them for arg-passing (AFAIR), but I don't see why they couldn't. I'm not even convinced that positional arguments are fatal for language design. Most popular languages today lack named arguments. They're usually only named on the callee side. I'm sure we've all run across a C function call that looked like foo(a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h), and cursed the author under our breath, and then counted out to the argument number we wanted to change. Languages succeed or fail for many reasons, but I don't think I've ever seen "calling convention" be the deciding factor (no pun intended). In the more general sense of concatenative (not necessarily stack-based) languages, Unix pipelines are a common example, and they don't seem to be doomed.