alt Hacker NewsBecause, in the latter case, you have to declare a function argument for /every possible option/ that you want your graphics API to expose, and you need to do this every time you add a new option.
On the other hand, declaring the options through composition means that the API for "plot" remains static, and adding/removing options can be done trivially without an API change.
Composition (rather than parameters) is also more flexible. Let's say you want to divide your plot into three sub-plots, two of which are 200x200, and another which is 200x400. How do you express this as a keyword parameter? In composition, you could do something like:
plot( ggsubplot(ggvsplit(ggsize(200,400), gghsplit(ggsize(200,200), ggsize(200,200)))) )
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Honestly operator overloading is almost always a bad choice IMO. There are cases (e.g. matrix math) where it's the right choice because of semantic clarity, but the indirection it creates in exchange for readability is costly. It's always obvious when a function is being called, and how to navigate to the implementation, but the same is not true of overloaded operators.
kwargs exists, and is rather more pythonic. Just pass the kwargs dict to a standard formatting function, et voila.
And how do you express that as arithmetic?
I can get as far as `plot() / 3` but then no idea how to proceed. I don't think overloading arithmetic is a very good way to express this.