Clean Code in Python

The number of arguments in functions

In this section, we agree on the idea that having functions or methods that take too many arguments is a sign of bad design (a code smell). Then, we propose ways of dealing with this issue.

The first alternative is a more general principle of software design—reification (creating a new object for all of those arguments that we are passing, which is probably the abstraction we are missing). Compacting multiple arguments into a new object is not a solution specific to Python, but rather something that we can apply in any programming language.

Another option would be to use the Python-specific features we saw in the previous section, making use of variable positional and keyword arguments to create functions ...