First, sentences like "Not because it’s complicated. Just because I have no idea what I’m looking at." and "Tiny interruption. Still annoying every time." fatigue me, it's like you have an editor who, no matter what the content is, tries to spice up your writing with lots of little punchy exclamations, not everything needs such emphasis
Second, this may differ a bit from language to language, but maybe those booleans should not be a boolean: https://gleam.run/documentation/conventions-patterns-and-ant... for example isAdmin boolean could instead be a UserRole custom type, with variants Normal and Admin, which is easier to understand in the function call, and extendable with another Moderator (or whatever) variant
I've been using this pattern for the past couple years for the benefits the author mentions. In addition to that, it can help with overly complicated functions (which, ok, could probably be refactored) that have multiple optional arguments.
Even though in OCaml's functional style it is actually like this:
createUser user ~isAdmin:true ~sendWelcomeEmail:false
Using the fact that a variable named exactly like a labeled argument is automatically assigned to it, we can make the call more concise (especially if reusing existing variables):
let isAdmin = true in
let sendWelcomeEmail = false in
createUser user ~isAdmin ~sendWelcomeEmail
There is something to be said for the bitmasks that are so common in C, createUser(user, ADMIN | SENDMAIL); has a lot more clarity than createUser(user, true, false, true);
I don't mind the object approach used here but its quite verbose in comparison even in Javascript. Having to name the variable and set whether its true or false is a lot more than needs to be done. Booleans in general have quite poor readibility and maintenance especially if a third possibility arrives.
In the last couple of years I’ve started using named parameters a bunch more across languages. I consider objects like this close to the JS version of a named parameter. I probably would have thrown “name” in myself so it’s one arg for the whole func.
I feel like a goal with good code is localizing understanding even if it occasionally duplicates something like a parameter name.
named arguments are hacking object literals to provide additional readability. it's ok, but not for all code paths, they have a true overhead. problem is that these things start to become idee fixes in teams (all funcs should have named args!). ideally, this could be fixed in the language.
Second, this may differ a bit from language to language, but maybe those booleans should not be a boolean: https://gleam.run/documentation/conventions-patterns-and-ant... for example isAdmin boolean could instead be a UserRole custom type, with variants Normal and Admin, which is easier to understand in the function call, and extendable with another Moderator (or whatever) variant
so... it does toggle the menu? and toggleMenu(false) doesn't toggle it and keeps it as it is?
or is it toggle extended menu vs toggle basic menu?
Avoid the Long Parameter List
https://testing.googleblog.com/2024/05/avoid-long-parameter-...
I don't mind the object approach used here but its quite verbose in comparison even in Javascript. Having to name the variable and set whether its true or false is a lot more than needs to be done. Booleans in general have quite poor readibility and maintenance especially if a third possibility arrives.
I feel like a goal with good code is localizing understanding even if it occasionally duplicates something like a parameter name.
const isAdmin = true; . . . createUser(user, isAdmin, sendWelcomeEmail)
Ultimately I think I’d bias towards readability vs the marginal perf increase though.
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/functions.html#named-arguments
> And I’ve seen real calls like this in production code: > updateSettings(user, true, false, true, false)
Really? He wants named parameters on all function calls cos he's got a memory like a sieve? This is a long solved problem to me