I think there are cases where the first few arguments would be better to maintain as positional, but users would very rarely use more than two, and we have long assumed keyword arguments in most cases, and never received complaints when we have inserted not at the end or deprecated in the middle.
I would expect that forcing all params after the first two (or three) to be keyword arguments would formalise existing tacit assumptions, would benefit maintainability, and would break very little code. On Thu, 15 Nov 2018 at 20:34, Gael Varoquaux <gael.varoqu...@normalesup.org> wrote: > I am really in favor of the general idea: it is much better to use named > arguments for everybody (for readability, and to be less depend on > parameter ordering). > > However, I would maintain that we need to move slowly with backward > compatibility: changing in a backward-incompatible way a library brings > much more loss than benefit to our users. > > So +1 for enforcing the change on all new arguments, but -1 for changing > orders in the existing arguments any time soon. > > I agree that it would be good to push this change in existing models. We > should probably announce it strongly well in advance, make sure that all > our examples are changed (people copy-paste), wait a lot, and find a > moment to squeeze this in. > > Gaël > > On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 06:12:35PM +1100, Joel Nothman wrote: > > We could just announce that we will be making this a syntactic > constraint from > > version X and make the change wholesale then. It would be less formal > backwards > > compatibility than we usually hold by, but we already are loose with > parameter > > ordering when adding new ones. > > > It would be great if after this change we could then reorder parameters > to make > > some sense! > > > _______________________________________________ > > scikit-learn mailing list > > scikit-learn@python.org > > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scikit-learn > > > -- > Gael Varoquaux > Senior Researcher, INRIA Parietal > NeuroSpin/CEA Saclay , Bat 145, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette France > Phone: ++ 33-1-69-08-79-68 > http://gael-varoquaux.info http://twitter.com/GaelVaroquaux > _______________________________________________ > scikit-learn mailing list > scikit-learn@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/scikit-learn >
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