I do understand and use that features. My point it's that they aren't obvious. One of Python strengths was that any programmer could look at it and know what was going on, and, for newbies, it was much easier to learn.

I'm among the few unimpressed by list comprehensions. I use them because they're "idiomatic", but I'm equally comfortable with good old map(), which, I admit, it may be equally foreign for imperative-only programmers.

About the xrange() example, IIRC the iterator protocol predates generators, and probably is easier to grasp since the state is handled explicitely.

Decorators, as Lisp macros, are powerful but, if not handled with care, the source of very subtle bugs, because the thing you're looking at(the decorated function) doesn't do what it seems to do.

Anyway I'm not arguing against this artifacts, just pointing that, some of the merits of Python that were true a decade ago, aren't anymore.