Magical annotations? Do you mean decorators? Or maybe types? Whether they're present at all depends on the code base, and most probably have neither. [i*i f

Magical annotations? Do you mean decorators? Or maybe types? Whether they're present at all depends on the code base, and most probably have neither. [i*i for i in range(10)] is hardly terse or cryptic. Python regular expressions are much like regular expressions anywhere else, so you're not really criticising Python there. You might need extra backslashes if you were trying to do them without raw strings (r'\s*' == '\\s*'), but that's hardly unique to Python either.