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For a language that says it'll work hard to be IDE friendly, an IDE can easily show you the argument names and their order for any function. On IntelliJ, it eve

• Jaxan 6y ago
  But why not turn this around? Let the IDE autocomplete everything, so it’s easy for the writer (or even hide the named arguments). And have the named arguments in the source code, then all readers can read it no matter their IDE!
  • mattmanser 6y ago
    Because it's a pain to navigate with the keyboard, plus accidental completion means more deleting, and other little niggles like that.
• structural 6y ago
  I can't disagree more strongly about this. Many, many times I'm trying to understand a codebase, and what I have is that codebase, not the dozens of dependencies involved, and not a full development/build environment. I may not even know what, if any, IDE the original developers used. There's also very common sources of bugs when functions take multiple arguments of same (or sadly in some languages, implicitly convertible) types. With named arguments in complex functions, you can sit down, read the code, and spot the bugs. Happens frequently enough in code review that we have a category for it. Without named parameters here, every single function call becomes a game of "mouse over the parameter in the IDE". Moreover, "you can just read the docs inline in the IDE" also causes people to not think much about naming things, which also harms maintainability. It's a real issue in large, long-lived codebases that may not seem like much in smaller projects.