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Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

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Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#71

Post by noir_lord »

cletus wrote: post #64

So here's a good test for the value of [language feature X]: Do people naturally try and reinvent that feature in its absence? So for named parameters you have: 1. Javascript would often be written with methods with a single "options" parameter, where "options" is an anonymous object and basically a map; 2. Day-to-day I write Hack. Many functions are similarly written taking a shape as an argument. Shapes are structs…

Three? I found one in work codebase that had 9.

That's 2^9 states to consider.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#72

Post by tjpnz »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31
ThomWilhelm3 wrote: post #27

I always wonder why PHP never seems to favour making breaking changes to keep things cleaner, if you aren't going to improve language constructs in a major version, when will they be cleaned up?

I think that post Python 3 nobody is going to do that. It would be interesting to see a fork which removed all the crud though. Something that was easy to use for the person doing occaisional web work or beginner but without the traps and pitfalls.

>It would be interesting to see a fork which removed all the crud though.

My understanding was that some of that already exists in Hack. Although it seems they might've not gone far enough.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#73

Post by cyphax »

flukus wrote: post #20
stinos wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who want ... and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies Are there really people aiming for that, as a goal? Or is it rather just the result of large-scale software? And/or if it's really complex, then perhaps that's just the result of suboptimal design, not the intent?

Yes, sort of. There are many people that think of OOP as the goal and not the tool, that a more OOP solutions is better. Some of them equate complex class hierarchies with a job well done. I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but I've worked that think a if/switch statements are a code smell that should be converted to complex class hierarchies.

I can sympathize with that, but at the same time: the idea that the language and its OOP implementation is a tool rather than the goal, and the idea of improving said tool are not mutually exclusive. :)

In my experiences with C#, things like named params have been nice, even if it's often just syntactic sugar; these things can be quality of life improvements for the programmer without changing anything about the goal.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#74

Post by majewsky »

stinos wrote: post #68
thinkindie wrote: post #43

I really love this new feature however my only concern is that renaming some parameters will trigger a lot of changes in other places as a side effect, thus polluting diffs.

I get what you mean, but I remember at one point going through some kind of 'oh no, it's a large diff' or even 'do not do this because the diff will increase' phase. And I realized that's just not ok. There's already enough things to keep in mind when programming, adding an extra one just because some external tool which actually doesn't have a lot to do with how the code works, i.e. holding back changes because of d…

My biggest pet peeve is when I meticulously craft a feature branch with commits neatly separated by subtopic so that it's pleasant to review... and then the reviewer just takes a glance, writes "lgtm" and squash-merges.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#75

Post by rglullis »

pansa2 wrote: post #40
thaumaturgy wrote: post #7

I'm ambivalent. There's a tension in PHP-land between PHP's roots as a low-ish level, get-it-done, hackish language, with its big standard library and simple scalar types, and the better-organized and quite vocal developers who want it to be more Java-like, with great big frameworks and many deeply-nested complex class hierarchies. Instead of unwieldy hobbyist-hacker balls of mud, you build enterprise-scale balls of…

> There's a tension in PHP-land between [...] hobbyist-hacker [vs] enterprise-scale IMO the same tension exists in Python. The hobbyist-hackers are using the language to write small-ish scripts, and the enterprise-scale developers are working on million-line codebases. Unfortunately for the hobbyist-hackers, at some point (perhaps when the BDFL started working at Dropbox), the focus of the language shifted from the f…

You'd have a point if there were any changes that are being introduced and putting developers on a straight-jacket. But I don't see this tension at all.

What is recent on Python3 that makes it hostile to hobbyists? The new features are optional, it's not like Python is forcing people to adopt mypy.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#77

Post by [deleted] »

raziel2p wrote: post #70
waheoo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than plain object constructs these kinds of functions are unheard of and better handled with a parameter object or array. I can't help but feel if they just set up a clean way to name construct Params for classes this wouldn't need to happen.

Why are they better handled with a parameter object or array? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23962955 What is the functional difference between a named construct "Params" and just allowing named parameters?

[deleted]

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#78

Post by mrweasel »

echelon wrote: post #41
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that post Python 3 nobody is going to do that. It would be interesting to see a fork which removed all the crud though. Something that was easy to use for the person doing occaisional web work or beginner but without the traps and pitfalls.

Python 3 attempted too much change at once. The Python folks could have spread incremental rollout of the changes across several major version numbers and probably not have faced such slow adoption.

I'm not sure that they could have spread it out. I believe that was the point of Python 3. Still, PHP may end up in the exact same position Python was in for the last decade, if they tried to do a similar change.

It could be worse of cause, they could end up like Perl 6 (now Raku), which makes Python 3 look like a successful transition in comparison.

Re: Named arguments are coming in PHP 8

#79

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

jonplackett wrote: post #46

This was my favourite thing about learning Swift. I hadn’t used a named argument language before. It feels very relaxing knowing that the compiler can check all these things for you. I haven’t used php for years but it’s cool to see it adopting this. Maybe I’ll give it another go!

C# has had named arguments for a while now too - and I’m in love with them. They’ve helped me avoid many ugly bugs caused by refactoring, such as when a method has many parameters with the same type - and a refactoring reordered or added/deleted parameters - thanks to named-parameters the call-sites still worked instead of silently failing (because the call-site would still be type-correct and compiled, even if it was intent-incorrect).

My only peeve is that VS still doesn’t let you style/colour named-argument labels in a different colour, so it does add to visual-noise in the editor.

Adding labels to every argument is just silly, so I do have a personal hard-and-fast rule that any call-site of a method with literal arguments must be explicitly labelled (especially booleans!), and any call-site of a method with consecutive homogenous typed parameters must also be labelled - these rules have worked out fantastically for me.

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