Well, keyword arguments can be used well in ruby, though clearly, in the code you've been dealing with they haven't. Some guidelines. Use .merge for default va

Well, keyword arguments can be used well in ruby, though clearly, in the code you've been dealing with they haven't. Some guidelines. Use .merge for default values, not ternary operators. Keep it minimal. Rails does a good job of using keywords for stuff that's optional, and positional arguments for stuff that isn't. For instance link_to 'My Website', 'http://example.net', :class => 'my-css-class'. Here, the arguments you need, the link title and href are non-optional positional args. HTML attributes OTOH are option hash args.. It sounds like in the code you've inherited, though I can't be sure, there are fairly complicated hashes being passed around all kinds of places. These should probably be objects, not hashes, in the first place. I'll admit though, I can't be certain from my limited vantage point.