I think it's better than the alternative too. You always have some concept of the API leak into the consumer. You either remember explicit names, or remember t

I think it's better than the alternative too. You always have some concept of the API leak into the consumer. You either remember explicit names, or remember their positional pseudo-names 'first', 'second', 'third' etc. Unnamed arguments bring up more issues such as ordering consistency (see: PHP's many notorious cases), deprecation leaving 'holes' in argument lists, etc. In Perl and many other languages we just provide a hash (aka dict) of key/value pairs. This lets the functions decide how to handle breaking changes which involves some annoying boilerplate but overall works fairly well. It's nicer with proper language support though.