"rocketnia's concern I addressed by passing through unknown keyword args unchanged"
The reason I'm okay with this approach is because it localizes the complexity to each function. This way I don't dislike the language; I just dislike the idioms currently being used in it.
Consider the use of flat text formats for shell scripts, HTTP headers, CSS properties, XML attributes, etc. They're usually convenient enough to type out manually, and that also makes them convenient to generate in simple cases, but writing a parser for them can be tough due to the same syntactic sugars that made them convenient to generate in the first place. Writing a full-featured generator or parser can also be tough, because sometimes future versions of the text format may allow it to encode more information.
With keyword arguments, the syntax for a function call is more complicated and sugary, putting programmers like me in the position of wondering what kind of headaches they should go through to parse or generate this format. If the headaches are unclear, combining programs becomes hard, because each developer might opt for different headaches, at which point I think they overlap in the form of complex glue code. :)
I have a greatly-enhanced respect for this perspective over the past month. Look at my travails over the past day trying to get optional, keyword and destructured args to play well together: https://github.com/akkartik/arc/compare/342ebf57a8...e347973.... Or my travails over the past month trying to build macex in wart in the presence of optional, keyword and destructured args AND quoted AND aliased params AND already-eval'd args[1] AND incompletely-eval'd args[2]: https://github.com/akkartik/wart/compare/30025ee25c...cabaa0.... Clearly there's some point at which I jump the shark :)
[2] related to partial eval: https://github.com/akkartik/wart/commit/8239ed9d21. I've been struggling intermittently with partial eval for two years now. This now year-long attempt might well be utterly useless.
---
Perhaps the easiest to understand and most serious extant example of the knots I end up tying myself into:
arc> (iso :x :x)
nil
This is because x is one of the params of iso. Even more serious, this happens even if you try to compare a variable that evaluates to :x. Or a variable that evaluates to a large structure containing :x somewhere in it. Ugh! The reason for this is that I'm extracting keyword args at function-call time inside each function. This:
It took me three years to notice yesterday that I'm extracting keywords from post-evaluated arguments. Ugh! Urrrgggh!
Weird thing is, even wart has this problem. Even though I would superficially seem to be extracting keyword args pre-evaluation. I still need to debug this. Or perhaps I shouldn't debug this. Perhaps I should just throw up my hands and delete all my repos and become a hermit.
