There's really nothing wrong with having two different signatures, it's a pretty pythonic way to do things. It's harder to document for sure, but other than that hardly a problem in many cases.

This post unfortunately reads like one of those Java programmer discovers Python (except not really) posts, but for C++. In general if you find yourself inventing a new paradigm for a 30-year old language you just started working with, it's reason enough to doubt you're doing something suboptimal. However, in this case the author is actually very familiar with Python, so I'm kinda confused.