It’s not too bad I think, it’s just an evolution really. You can probably grok the basics of the type annotations in a short sit down. I can’t even remember when decorators were introduced but that even more greatly changed how python was written. I’ve been using python since 1.6 and I always thought the amount of repetition was ridiculous. I bet I’m not the only one that has written a “dsl” of what attrs and this pep does 1000 times using the facilities python had at the time: metaclasses, then decorators. Of course all these implementations were rushed, half assed and barely production quality. Despite any warts attrs is a pleasure to use. Type annotations boost IntelliJ/pycharm already quite clever assistance. One lingering thing is attrs named_attrs that while syntactically the best approach in my mind doesn’t work well with IntelliJ. So hopefully this will address it.

It's relatively recent. IMHO Python 3.5 to 3.7 feel like the language is going in a different direction than it did before -- type hints and the handling of asynchrony in particular.

After seeing the huge improvements that JavaScript has gone through over the years I'm all for language updates. Same with Java and C++ (although not as much for Java and I don't know C++ but I always hear C++11 is "new").

Python has grown a lot since then. Back then it was this "better scripting language" that every Linux user kinda knew. Now it's being used much more widely and that just wouldn't cut it any more.