> ... and there are only eight argument names. Which seems... limiting.

I would be fine with a programming language that limited functions to 8 arguments. Not because I never have a use for more, but it's a cost I'd be willing to pay in return for my colleagues never needing more.

Pylint and ruff [0] have a check for this that is set to warn over 5 arguments, but I don't think this is enabled by default and I haven't worked anywhere where this would cause the build to fail.

[0] https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/rules/too-many-arguments/

You're right about the records providing flexible order, I overlooked that.

But Kip lets you repeat cases in arguments, so you're not limited to 8 arguments for a function. In cases where a function takes multiple arguments of the same case, the order in which those arguments are applied matters, otherwise it doesn't. So if you say "any number of arguments but only 8 are named, that seems bad", I'd understand, but that is a relatively uncommon problem to run into, especially in a toy language like this that is not meant for any serious work.