I'd got a step further and say that in business software, named parameters are preferable for all but the smallest functions.

Using curried OR tuple arg lists requires remembering the name of an argument by its position. This saves room on the screen but is mental overhead.

The fact is that arguments do always have names anyway and you always have to know what they are.

▲ layer8 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I want to agree, but there is the tension that in business code, what you pass as arguments is very often already named like the parameter, so having to indicate the parameter name in the call leads to a lot of redundancy. And if you’re using domain types judiciously, the types are typically also different, hence (in a statically-typed language) there is already a reduced risk of passing the wrong parameter.

Maybe there could be a rule that parameters have to be named only if their type doesn’t already disambiguate them and if there isn’t some concordance between the naming in the argument expression and the parameter, or something along those lines. But the ergonomics of that might be annoying as well.

▲ sestep 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is an issue in Python but less so in languages like JavaScript that support "field name punning", where you pass named arguments via lightweight record construction syntax, and you don't need to duplicate a field name if it's the same as the local variable name you're using for that field's value.

	▲	layer8 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That forces you to name the variable identically to the parameter. For example, you may want to call your variable `loggedInUser` when the fact that the user is logged in is important for the code’s logic, but then you can’t pass it as-is for a field that is only called `user`. Having to name the parameter leads to routinely having to write `foo: blaFoo` because just `blaFoo` wouldn’t match, or else to drop the informative `bla`. That’s part of the tension I was referring to.

▲ twic 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

OCaml has a neat little feature where it elides the parameter and variable name if they're the same:

  let warn_user ~message = ... (* the ~ makes this a named parameter *)

  let error = "fatal error!!" in
  warn_user ~message:error; (* different names, have to specify both *)

  let message = "fatal error!!" in
  warn_user ~message; (* same names, elided *)

The elision doesn't always kick in, because sometimes you want the variable to have a different name, but in practice it kicks in a lot, and makes a real difference. In a way, cases when it doesn't kick in are also telling you something, because you're crossing some sort of context boundary where some value is called different things on either side.