I've written a PEP for what might be thought of as "mutable namedtuples with defaults, but not inheriting tuple's behavior" (a mouthful, but it sounded simpler when I first thought of it). It's heavily influenced by the attrs project. It uses PEP 526 type annotations to define fields. From the overview section: @dataclass class InventoryItem: name: str unit_price: float quantity_on_hand: int = 0 def total_cost(self) -> float: return self.unit_price * self.quantity_on_hand Will automatically add these methods: def __init__(self, name: str, unit_price: float, quantity_on_hand: int = 0) -> None: self.name = name self.unit_price = unit_price self.quantity_on_hand = quantity_on_hand def __repr__(self): return f'InventoryItem(name={self.name!r},unit_price={self.unit_price!r},quantity_on_hand={self.quantity_on_hand!r})' def __eq__(self, other): if other.__class__ is self.__class__: return (self.name, self.unit_price, self.quantity_on_hand) == (other.name, other.unit_price, other.quantity_on_hand) return NotImplemented def __ne__(self, other): if other.__class__ is self.__class__: return (self.name, self.unit_price, self.quantity_on_hand) != (other.name, other.unit_price, other.quantity_on_hand) return NotImplemented def __lt__(self, other): if other.__class__ is self.__class__: return (self.name, self.unit_price, self.quantity_on_hand) < (other.name, other.unit_price, other.quantity_on_hand) return NotImplemented def __le__(self, other): if other.__class__ is self.__class__: return (self.name, self.unit_price, self.quantity_on_hand) <= (other.name, other.unit_price, other.quantity_on_hand) return NotImplemented def __gt__(self, other): if other.__class__ is self.__class__: return (self.name, self.unit_price, self.quantity_on_hand) > (other.name, other.unit_price, other.quantity_on_hand) return NotImplemented def __ge__(self, other): if other.__class__ is self.__class__: return (self.name, self.unit_price, self.quantity_on_hand) >= (other.name, other.unit_price, other.quantity_on_hand) return NotImplemented Data Classes saves you from writing and maintaining these functions. The PEP is largely complete, but could use some filling out in places. Comments welcome! Eric. P.S. I wrote this PEP when I was in my happy place.