On 28 April 2017 at 14:07, Nick Coghlan
Am I missing some point?
Yes, the point I attempted to raise earlier: at the language design level, "How do we make __init__ methods easier to write?" is the *wrong question* to be asking. It's treating the symptom (writing an imperative initialiser is repetitive when it comes to field names) rather than the root cause (writing imperative initialisers is still part of the baseline recommendation for writing classes, and we don't offer any supporting infrastructure for avoiding that directly in the standard library) [...]
Ah, OK. I see what you're saying here. I agree, that's the direction we should be looking in. I'd sort of lumped all of that side of things in my mind under the header of "must take a look at attrs" and left it at that for now. My mistake. So basically yes, I agree we should have better means for writing common class definition patterns in a declarative way, retaining the current underlying mechanisms while making it so that people typically don't need to interact with them. I suspect that those means will probably take the form of stdlib/builtin support (decorators, custom base classes, etc) but the design will need some thrashing out. Beyond that, I don't really have much more to add until I've done some research into the current state of the art, in the form of libraries like attrs (and Stephan Hoyer mentioned typing.NamedTuple). Paul