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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious about the "Don't use Booleans as parameters" point. I primarily write Python and like to use keyword arguments in these cases. So the function call would look like

  get_message(full_message=True)

Is this an OK pattern for Python but not some other languages, or am I writing more confusing code than I had realized?

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That's exactly what the post is warning against. It's really hard to explain without a concrete example, but basically, I would make two functions:

get_full_message and get_partial_message or something like that

Is it safe to say that using named keyword arguments mitigates this issue?

Well, if I'm reading that, I'm wondering what gets returned if I set that parameter to false. Does it return a summary of the message, or does it return the first word or does it return null? Using named parameters doesn't answer that question any more clearly than OP's example.

If you add a safeguard to the function itself that disallows full_message as a positional arg, so no one is able to write "get_message(False)", then it's okay.

The key here is the reader being able to tell at a glance what the args are/do, without needing to hunt down documentation.

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