noop()returns something

YAGNI.

This is rejected because it complicates the semantics. For example, if you always return both*argsand**kws,what do you return when none of those are given? Returning a tuple of((),{})is kind of ugly, but provides consistency. But you might also want to just returnNonesince that’s also conceptually what the function was passed.

Or, what if you pass in exactly one positional argument, e.g.noop(7).Do you return7or((7,),{})?And so on.

The author claims that you won’t ever need the return value ofnoop()so it will always returnNone.

Coghlan’s Dialogs (edited for formatting):

My counterargument to this would bemap(noop,iterable), sorted(iterable,key=noop),etc. (filter,max,and minall accept callables that accept a single argument, as do many of the itertools operations).

Makingnoop()a useful default function in those cases just needs the definition to be:

defnoop(*args,**kwds):
returnargs[0]ifargselseNone

The counterargument to the counterargument is that usingNone as the default in all these cases is going to be faster, since it lets the algorithm skip the callback entirely, rather than calling it and having it do nothing useful.