Exactly this. IMO we just need better ways of rendering a mailing list inbox as a series of issues/PRs. And maybe better tooling from IDEs to “open a PR” using git send-email.

Source hut is close to my ideal here, but still seems rather complex. Maybe I just don’t appreciate the necessary problems it solves yet.

Agree with several people here that named parameters are a good solution, they add minimal overhead at the call site and function declaration and look very natural.

Another option for languages that want function arguments to have fixed size is bitmasks. I wonder if it could be a useful language feature to infer the flag names from the function declaration. Something like

def my_function(arg1, arg2, [FLAG1, FLAG2]) {
    if (FLAG1) {
        do thing
    } 
   ...
}

my_function(val1, val2, FLAG1 | FLAG2)

Dumper’s delight

Its a fair point, and well explained. However, I think it implies that illegal immigrants are fine so long as they’re not more criminal than the general population.

Generally if somebody is using crime statistics to argue for more immigration control, they’re probably the kind of person that believes the only acceptable amount of crime for an illegal immigrant to commit is zero crime.