Things (Almost) No One Thinks About When Designing Functions in Python

Comments · 196

• AR

  @ArjanCodes · 2 years ago · pinned

  💡 Get my FREE 7-step guide to help you consistently design great software: <a href="https://arjancodes.com/designguide">https://arjancodes.com/designguide</a>.

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• ME

  @metal571 · 2 years ago

  &quot;Make interfaces easy to use correctly and hard to use incorrectly.&quot;<br>- Scott Meyers, The Most Important Design Guideline

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• SA

  @saitaro · 2 years ago

  There&apos;s another naming style sometimes used in the Python stdlib and ecosystem: adjectives describing the quality of the returned object, like reversed, sorted and functools.batched. They do not change the argument, so a name like &quot;sort&quot; would be confusing in this case, it&apos;s used for the corresponding method, which actually transforms the object.<br> I don&apos;t know how this style is named though.

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• RY

  @rycona-yt · 9 months ago

  In my heart, I believe &quot;kwargs&quot; is the sound a coding chocobo (chocodebo) makes.

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• DR

  @DrGreenGiant · 2 years ago

  An approach I use is by going a level up to the function that is calling the one I&apos;m about to write. In that calling function, the name and arguments should read in plain English, almost like a story. Ultimately, if you&apos;ve got your face in a function you can see what it does, but if you are in the outer scope, a good signature means you don&apos;t need to dig deeper on that line to reason about what&apos;s going on. <br>Great video, thank you!

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• YV

  @yvesdeutschmann9899 · 2 years ago

  Great video. At first I was wondering what could you possibly talk about 30 mins for just the function signature but I actually learned a lot. Thanks for putting this together

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• AL

  @alan1world · 1 year ago

  You can specify options using Literal. From the docs: `mode: Literal[&quot;rb&quot;, &quot;wb&quot;, &quot;ab&quot;, &quot;xb&quot;, &quot;r+b&quot;, &quot;w+b&quot;, &quot;a+b&quot;, &quot;x+b&quot;],`

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• DA

  @dannorris1406 · 2 years ago

  Great video as Always Arjan. Thanks for covering this topic. A real bugbear of mine is splitting function headers across multiple lines like @ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI6CqykFbDc&amp;t=494">8:14</a> this is obviously auto-formated and it&apos;s a PEP8 guideline I know but I find it makes headers much more difficult to read (unless they are really long with lots of arguments - which they shouldn&apos;t be). I started using &quot;autopep8.args&quot;: [&quot;--ignore=E501&quot;] in my settings to ignore long lines.

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• ED

  @edgeeffect · 7 months ago (edited)

  Oh nice!!! I try to avoid `Any` as much as possible... but &quot;have to&quot; use it sometimes for dictionaries... I&apos;ve always wished there was a typed dictionary! And now I know that THERE IS! :)<br>(or I could just use a DataClass) ;)

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• ST

  @steveweber711 · 10 months ago

  So glad to see you teach these things. It&apos;s also been my approach for many years. I love the usage of type annotations and parameter naming.

• YO

  @youmal30 · 2 years ago

  Regarding variable naming, I use plural form for a collection as in &quot;cars&quot; unless the variable name hints to a collection as in &quot;list_car&quot;, &nbsp;in which case I use the singular form.

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• AN

  @antoniov845 · 2 years ago

  You could use NamedTuple for Options in that case it could be destructured almost like in TS

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