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 that have a dynamic signature. While this might be a Pythonic way of proceeding, we have to be careful not to abuse the feature, because we might be creating something that is so dynamic that it is hard to maintain. In this case, we should take a look at the body of the function. Regardless of the signature, and whether the parameters seem to be correct, if the function is doing too many different things responding to the values of the parameters, then it is a sign that it has to be broken down into multiple smaller functions (remember, functions should do one thing, and one thing only!).