[dragonwriter]

> This runs counter to the Zen: "Readability counts", "Explicit is better than implicit"

Huh? It's both making parameters more explicit and functions using it more readable and self-documenting.

In fact, the old way, before bare / and * in args list, where functions essentially had mandatory optional-keyword arguments made every function create an API in violation of “There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.”

[jakear]

I’m not interested in comparing it to the old way, that’s saying “this unintuitive way of doing things is a better way of doing them than before when they were impossible”. Achieving that is a too low a bar to be worth discussing.

It is very much not readable, as evidenced by the other python-experienced commenters on this thread having no clue what it means (“readability” doesn’t mean “easy to understand for people who already know what it means”, as achieving that is a very low bar. What should be targeted is “obvious enough to have a clear meaning even to those who haven’t studied the exact section of the spec”, which is possible in the JS approach as they’re reusing the same syntactic constructs throughout the language, but is impossible in the Python approach because they introduce new syntax to work around every little limitation of their existing syntax)