[scikit-learn] make all new parameters keyword-only?

[Gael Varoquaux]

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!

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    Gael Varoquaux
    Senior Researcher, INRIA Parietal
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