Maybe there are some situations in which named arguments could be a genuine improvement, but I think in general it just encourages sloppiness and unneeded verbo

Maybe there are some situations in which named arguments could be a genuine improvement, but I think in general it just encourages sloppiness and unneeded verbosity. It encourages writing functions that needlessly take way too many parameters (can't you instead think of a way to simplify the problem?). It encourages calling functions without paying attention to all the parameters, which you usually shouldn't ever ignore. Just like you shouldn't arbitrarily ignore return values. If you don't know your function like the back of your hand, you need documentation. Of course, documentation might be sparse in sloppy code that encourages people to ignore the details... C is like that really. You really need to pay attention to detail when you're writing C. And if there's too much to worry about, it means you need to redesign and simplify the APIs and/or data you're dealing with. If I encounter functions with lots of parameters in third party libraries I have to use, I will annotate each argument with a comment (after checking the documentation).