Methods taking "self" as an argument is a dirty hack, ain't no magic there. The language is just pretty ugly. It's got the whole whitespace thing going on, which is forced, and some might think it gives a good aesthetic but that is dust in the wind in terms of help for Python's ease on the eyes. The whole standard namespacing and mix of oop/procedural global functions is just..schizophrenic, the capitalization scheme is dastardly. I haven't seen many languages that look more _basic_ than python. It's a frankenstein of Perl/Ruby and Basic. Forced verbosity is egh.

Here's your magic methods and properties: http://www.rafekettler.com/magicmethods.html

Those magic methods kind of remind me of clever hacks while coding in PHP.