[swift-evolution] named parameters - why hidden first?/proposal interest

[Charles Srstka]

> On Jan 23, 2016, at 5:34 AM, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> on Fri Jan 22 2016, Charles Srstka <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
> 
>>> On Jan 21, 2016, at 1:25 PM, Tony Parker via swift-evolution
>>> <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> We surveyed the entire surface area of the iOS and OS X SDKs,
>>> looking to see how many arguments typical methods had. We found that
>> 
>>> the vast majority of methods actually have just one argument. If we
>>> went with a rule that first arguments should be named, then methods
>>> like:
>>> 
>>> sayMessage(“hello”)
>>> 
>>> would be this instead:
>>> 
>>> say(message: “hello”)
>>> 
>>> which isn’t really much of an improvement, in my mind.
>> 
>> How about making it so that methods with just one argument have no
>> label on the argument by default, but methods with two or more
>> arguments have labels on all arguments? This would prevent what you
>> describe above, while eliminating the ugliness of one parameter being
>> treated differently from all the rest in the same method.
> 
> ...and replace it with the ugliness of one parameter being treated
> differently from two.  It would also force me to write "_" explicitly on
> the first parameter of all of my 2+ parameter methods.  Yes, it's a
> little bit weird, but when optimizing APIs for readability at the call
> site, the defaults we have actually work in practice.

I’m playing devil’s advocate a bit, here—but is being forced to write “_” on a parameter any more onerous than being forced to write the entire label name out twice?

Charles

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