Why Using Tuples Could Be Frowned Upon In Python Production Code

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Tuples are versatile and useful, but I don’t see them that much in production code. Here are some reasons why:

Writing type hints for tuples might not be the most explicit

Let’s say we have a function that does stuff, and returns a tuple.

def do_stuff() -> tuple[str, int, int]:
    """
    some docstring
    """
    fruit_name: str = get_fruit_name()
    price: int = get_price()
    quantity: int = get_quantity()

    return fruit_name, price, quantity

^ notice that when we attempt to write our type hint, we use tuple[str, int, int]

This just means that our function is meant to return a tuple of length 3 — the first element being a string, and the other 2 being integers.

Isn’t this pretty straightforward?

The problem with this

• At first glance, we know that tuple[str, int, int] is returned
• But at first glance, we don’t know what this tuple[str, int, int] is supposed to represent