But if python were to become overly complicated I'll find something else. Three years ago I have not not used python at all, now I'm using it for everything.
You're in luck, python 2.4 won't be significantly changing anytime soon.
PS. why can't decorators solve this optional type checking problem? I clearly remember this as being one of the selling points for having decorators in the first place...
Because they are quite obviously an ugly and overly complicated solution. Even Guido understood this:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2004-September/048518.html
"A warning: some people have shown examples of extreme uses of decorators. I've seen decorators proposed for argument and return type annotations, and even one that used a decorator to create an object that did a regular expression substitution. Those uses are cute, but I recommend being conservative when deciding between using a decorator or some other approach, especially in code that will see a large audience (like 3rd party library packages). Using decorators for type annotations in particular looks tedious, and this particular application is so important that I expect Python 3000 will have optional type declarations integrated into the argument list." -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
