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>I absolutely hate named parameters. They’re biased towards new users of a language and quickly become painful to write once you’re familiar with the function c

>I absolutely hate named parameters. They’re biased towards new users of a language and quickly become painful to write once you’re familiar with the function call. It is a fair complaint, but don't you think this is offset almost entirely by a good IDE?

pmarreck 6y ago
I haven't used an IDE in years. Just VSCode. Which is not really an IDE. I haven't missed it. I think that if a language depends on an IDE to be useful, it's a design smell.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  VSCode is an IDE. Otherwise, what is am IDE according to you? Is Emacs an IDE? Eclispe?
  - eitland 6y ago
    VS Code (which I like and have used extensively for a number of projects) is kind of an IDE, but it doesn't quite compare to full blown Java IDEs IMO.
    - Joker_vD 6y ago
      It's an editor with syntax highlighter, autocompletion, go-to-def, and go-to-uses that also builds the code, runs the code, runs the tests, and also allows you to run them (code & tests) under a debugger. Oh, and it also has projects/solutions/workspaces/whatever they're called. Back in my days™ that's what they used to call an "IDE". But today that's just "glorified Notepad++", I guess? What features does it miss that stop it being a full-blown IDE?
      - eitland 6y ago
        I wrote kind of like an IDE :-) Maybe I'm just a spoiled brat, but I came to Java from C, PHP, Visual Studio (the old one) and learned how nice programming could be before I left for .Net Core and frontend (with much TypeScript), mostly in VS Code but sometimes in Rider and Webstorm. To me, to be a real IDE these days you need to have proper refactoring support. And to a spoiled brat like me that excludes almost everything except Rider, Visual Studio with Resharper, NetBeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ :-) But yes, I too am old enough to remember back when the C/Assembler program we used to program microcontrollers were considered IDEs. And technically you are of course correct :-) I guess a better classification would be: IDE level 1,2,...n where what I call IDEs today are really level 3 IDEs.
lostcolony 6y ago
First, having spent the past two years in IntelliJ with Java, no. I still would have much preferred named parameters to having to worry about the order (and still occasionally mixing them up when they're not unique types, and only finding out when things fail). Second, if a language is heavily reliant on features from an IDE, yeah, I'll echo that's a badly designed language.
- WillPostForFood 6y ago
  Sorry, I agree with you. I like named parameters as well. I meant the overhead of having to type them is pretty much entirely offset by a good IDE that fills them out for you. I don't think there is a downside unless you are coding in a text editor.
erezsh 6y ago
Unlike positional arguments? ...

pmarreck 6y ago

I haven't used an IDE in years. Just VSCode. Which is not really an IDE. I haven't missed it. I think that if a language depends on an IDE to be useful, it's a design smell.

rightbyte 6y ago
VSCode is an IDE. Otherwise, what is am IDE according to you? Is Emacs an IDE? Eclispe?
- eitland 6y ago
  VS Code (which I like and have used extensively for a number of projects) is kind of an IDE, but it doesn't quite compare to full blown Java IDEs IMO.
  - Joker_vD 6y ago
    It's an editor with syntax highlighter, autocompletion, go-to-def, and go-to-uses that also builds the code, runs the code, runs the tests, and also allows you to run them (code & tests) under a debugger. Oh, and it also has projects/solutions/workspaces/whatever they're called. Back in my days™ that's what they used to call an "IDE". But today that's just "glorified Notepad++", I guess? What features does it miss that stop it being a full-blown IDE?
    - eitland 6y ago
      I wrote kind of like an IDE :-) Maybe I'm just a spoiled brat, but I came to Java from C, PHP, Visual Studio (the old one) and learned how nice programming could be before I left for .Net Core and frontend (with much TypeScript), mostly in VS Code but sometimes in Rider and Webstorm. To me, to be a real IDE these days you need to have proper refactoring support. And to a spoiled brat like me that excludes almost everything except Rider, Visual Studio with Resharper, NetBeans, Eclipse and IntelliJ :-) But yes, I too am old enough to remember back when the C/Assembler program we used to program microcontrollers were considered IDEs. And technically you are of course correct :-) I guess a better classification would be: IDE level 1,2,...n where what I call IDEs today are really level 3 IDEs.

lostcolony 6y ago

First, having spent the past two years in IntelliJ with Java, no. I still would have much preferred named parameters to having to worry about the order (and still occasionally mixing them up when they're not unique types, and only finding out when things fail). Second, if a language is heavily reliant on features from an IDE, yeah, I'll echo that's a badly designed language.

WillPostForFood 6y ago
Sorry, I agree with you. I like named parameters as well. I meant the overhead of having to type them is pretty much entirely offset by a good IDE that fills them out for you. I don't think there is a downside unless you are coding in a text editor.

erezsh 6y ago

Unlike positional arguments? ...