Re: Keyword Arguments

On 2012-06-15, at 8:07, Friedrich Dominicus <[email protected]> wrote:

> Jeremy Tregunna <[email protected]> writes:
> 
> > Not at all. If I can have it, I prefer the first form. 
> Well that is but one way of preference. You like it you use it, other
> programmers used to the more verbose form may not like your usage. And
> I'd think you find more things of your preferred way in the "functional"
> programming camp. I find Haskell notoriously in that regard. Is there a
> thing as too dense? I think yes, YMMV of course.
> 
The point of evolving languages is to help better express ideas of the day. While you are right that point wise and higher order functions are utilized greatly in functional languages, you miss the fact that Io is the first language (at least that I know of) which has native support for higher order messaging. As such, at first glance the:

list(1, 5, 2) sort(<)

can look a bit weird. I don't expect this to be natural right away for any developer, as most have never been exposed to the idea of higher order messaging. Once you understand that messages are lightweight communication paths, and that OO is all about the messages and not objects, I think you'll start to see the other forms as being very verbose without conveying additional meaning (read: boilerplate). 

I think embracing HOM in OO languages is a good thing, and wish there were more examples of it in the wild. 

Regards,

Jeremy Tregunna
>