I really like following style standards, as those specified in PEP 8. I have a linter that checks it automatically, and definitely my code is much better because of that. There is just one point in PEP 8, the E251 & E221 don't feel very good. Coming from a JavaScript background, I used to align the variable assignments as following: var var1 = 1234; var2 = 54; longer_name = 'hi'; var lol = { 'that' : 65, 'those' : 87, 'other_thing' : true }; And in my humble opinion, this improves readability dramatically. Problem is, this is dis-recommended by PEP 8. With dictionaries, is not that bad because spaces are allowed after the colon: dictionary = { 'something': 98, 'some_other_thing': False } I can "live" with variable assignments without alignment, but what I don't like at all is not to be able to pass named arguments in a function call, like this: some_func(length= 40, weight= 900, lol= 'troll', useless_var= True, intelligence=None) So, what I end up doing is using a dictionary, as following: specs = { 'length': 40, 'weight': 900, 'lol': 'troll', 'useless_var': True, 'intelligence': None } some_func(**specs) or just simply some_func(**{'length': 40, 'weight': 900, 'lol': 'troll', 'useless_var': True, 'intelligence': None}) But I have the feeling this work around is just worse than ignoring the PEP 8 E251 / E221. What is the best practice?