An empty method is generally considered bad practice and can lead to confusion, readability, and maintenance issues. Empty methods bring no
functionality and are misleading to others as they might think the method implementation fulfills a specific and identified requirement.
There are several reasons for a method not to have a body:
- It is an unintentional omission, and should be fixed to prevent an unexpected behavior in production.
- It is not yet, or never will be, supported. In this case an exception should be thrown.
- The method is an intentionally-blank override. In this case a nested comment should explain the reason for the blank override.
Exceptions
No issue will be raised when the empty method is abstract and meant to be overridden in a subclass, i.e. it is decorated with
abc.abstractmethod, abc.abstractstaticmethod, abc.abstractclassmethod or abc.abstractproperty.
Note however that these methods should normally have a docstring explaining how subclasses should implement these methods.
import abc
class MyAbstractClass(abc.ABC):
@abc.abstractproperty
def myproperty(self):
pass
@abc.abstractclassmethod
def myclassmethod(cls):
pass
@abc.abstractmethod
def mymethod(self):
pass
@abc.abstractstaticmethod
def mystaticmethod():
pass
