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Don’t get offended then.

They needed to make room for more AI posts

Imagine writing this comment on 2013 Hacker News with a straight face.

AI;dr: keyword arguments would be great in all languages, not just Smalltalk

Also, obviously bot/bought account.


Swift also has them. It's probably the one thing I sometimes wish Rust would copy from them.

Thinking more about this, I'm realizing that Swift was probably transitively inspired by Smalltalk; although I don't know much about Objective-C, my vague understanding is that it's a bit more inspired by Smalltalk's view of object-oriented programming via message passing than what commonly is considered OO nowadays (which is reflected somewhat in that it doesn't use the typical dot-operator for method calls), and I'm guessing that it was included in Swift as one of the things that was liked about Objective-C (and maybe a little to make interop more direct).

While I wish every language had them in a way, they do tend to enshrine the argument names in the ABI, so now you can't change those in public APIs. (Main reason I think it shouldn't be part of the ABI is because I think only the necessary things to identify and correctly use a contract should be part of the ABI)

I have been thinking off if there is a way to have it work without enshrining them in the ABI and my only real idea is: allow arbitrary names at the call site (e.g. `my_function(some_var=1)` or `my_function(some_var: 1)`) but don't enforce the naming, just have linting spit out a warning for it if it doesn't match.


I don't feel like anyone finds it onerous to not be able to rename functions as a non-breaking change, so it's not obvious to me that this is much of a deal-breaker. If anything, I'd be thrilled for it to force people to spend more time carefully picking the names of their parameters in public APIs so that the autocompletion/documentation popup in my editor has higher quality information!

Even the unobfuscated version is a work of art. You rarely see such concise and honestly beautiful C code.

Learning to use a search engine would be a great start.

As someone else that went on rotten in my formative years, the feeling of disgust was so immense to know I want to stay away from any sort of real-life gore. Yet your experience is so common (fascination, wonder) I wonder what the hell is wrong with people to willingly watch corpses and dead people.

Still, despite my dislikes, I would fight against censorship of these sites. Somehow I feel a kid seeing a corpse or a video of people dying is less psychologically damaging than, for example, getting into political or religious extreme communities.


You are partly right but also prey to the same issue: yes, most technopositivists lack broad enough knowledge to even conceive that technology can be a net negative for society (usually a lack of foundation in humanities, a common issue in CS educated people)

Yet your comment has a naive dismissal of anarchism as ‘teenage politics’ which betray a lack of understanding the rich history and meaning behind anarchism, which is common these days. Dismissing it wholesale is like dismissing physics because you think string theory is silly.


The bad thing about the Internet is that a machine can do that at scale and for very cheap, quickly drowning any human’s voice.

I miss when the Internet was mostly a collection of myopic views from naive people.


Then you need to read outside your bubble.

It would have been as easy to write a valid answer as a non-answer; _unless_ there is no valid answer.

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