I'd say that dictionaries are only the obvious "right" way if you're not planning on accessing any of their fields. Otherwise you have some set of expected fields, in which case you can define a namedtuple and avoid a vast array of nasty surprises. It's really easy to initialize a namedtuple from a dict (use ), as long as the dict has the right fields. If it doesn't, and you're planning on using its fields, the fact that this raises an exception is a good thing.