Clojure can simulate named parameters, or a mix of positional and named parameters. This is really old news, dating back to Clojure 1.2 if evidence serves, but I always have trouble finding this exact syntax, and it is not fully obvious.
Say you want to accept a certain number of optional parameters with names, and perhaps, defaults. It turns out you can combine rest parameters (the ones that come after a &) with map destructuring.
In the simple case, you don't care what the possible options are, and you don't have any defaults.
The keys and values you pass to this function, say (named-parameters :foo 1 :bar 2), are collected together as symbol params.
If you don't provide an even number of values (that is, the same number of keys and values), you'll get a reasonable exception, such as java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No value supplied for key: :bar
Easy-peasey ... but you need to extract values from the params map to use them inside the function, e.g.: (:foo params). It would be nicer to have them as symbols, just like with normal positional parameters. This is also easy, by leveraging more of the features of map destructuring:
The :keys identifies the keywords expected in the map; it works backwards from the symbol name, foo, to the expected keyword, :foo.
There's also a:syms(for when the keys are expected to be symbols) and:strs(for when the keys are expected to be strings).
The :or identifies default values for each symbol.
The end result is that we can rely on defaults from :or or provide our own values when invoking the function:
And since this is Clojure, you can combine all of these things together quite easily ... some positional parameters, some named, some identified by keywords, others identified by symbols.
