[image] What steps should the Julia community take to bring Julia to the next level of popularity? The inability to use positional arguments with keywords I would love to be able to use keywords with positional arguments. It’s one of my favorite “code should be self-documenting” features.

[image] adienes: I still haven’t seen a single counterargument to the point that the package developer can always choose their API to be kwargs and forward to internal methods with positional args. The problem here isn’t the motivation for the feature — it’s a fine feature for a language to h…

[image] ParadaCarleton: It’s been 3 years since I learned Julia and if it weren’t for the package manager I’d go back to Python for this feature alone You can easily implement your own keyword-only wrappers to get exactly the behavior you want. If you’re worried about it being type piracy, or…

[image] goerz: This can certainly make high-level functions easier to use, and produce more readable code, but it can also come at a performance cost, and doesn’t generally fit with arbitrary functions or interfaces. If the developers of Turing don’t want to support such an API, I wouldn’t thin…

How can I give a million likes to this :sweat_smile: Chris for BDFL 2024

Excuse my naivete, but I had assumed that the “Julian” approach to something like you’ve described as being to simply add type to the positional argument: function LinearAlgebra.eigvals( A::Hamiltonian ) # content end function LinearAlgebra.eigvals( A::Liouvillian ) # content end I hadn’t e…

[image] ParadaCarleton: sample(Xoshiro(0), NUTS(), model) It seems obvious what’s going on in this case. Is there another example of where named arguments would help?

[image] What steps should the Julia community take to bring Julia to the next level of popularity? The philosophy should be: whatever is best for the inexperienced user for the 90% use case The Julia community could also adopt Plasma’s motto: “Simple by default, powerful when needed.” […

Well actually the problem is that has a 50/50 shot at being the wrong order for NUTS() and model (I can never remember which comes first)

I mean, as someone who didn’t write @ParadaCarleton ’s code, when I saw sample(rng=Xoshiro(0), sampler=NUTS(), model=my_loglikelihood) I immediately was able to read what he wrote: “Ok, so use Xoshiro(0) as the random number generator, NUTS() is the sampler, and use my_loglikelihood as the model.” …

I don’t think anybody is disputing the potential value of designing an API to make heavy use of keyword arguments however, that goal has (almost) nothing to do with the specific design proposal, of making positional arguments named. I would conjecture that for nearly all functions that would benef…

You mean the case when you’re writing it rather than reading it?

Naming positional arguments at call site

Internals & Design

xiaoxi September 4, 2023, 8:52pm 33

The Julia community could also adopt Plasma’s motto: “Simple by default, powerful when needed.”

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Naming positional arguments at call site

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