> But annotations are much less powerful than Python decorators. Coming from Java and seeing what kind if stuff is practically done there with annotations (loo

> But annotations are much less powerful than Python decorators. Coming from Java and seeing what kind if stuff is practically done there with annotations (looking at you, Spring), Python decorators actually feel more constrained than annotations, in a fully beneficial sense. Yes, Python decorators run arbitrary code, but at least, there is a straight-forward relationship between the decorator and the location of that code. Decorators are just syntactic sugar for a function call that takes the decorated function as an argument - so you just have to look up the definition of the decorator to find out what it does. In contrast, a Java annotation does exactly nothing by itself - it's literally a piece of metadata stapled to a function or field or argument, etc. This metadata is accessible either at compile-time using compiler postprocessors, or at runtime using reflection. The code that accesses the annotation and implements its behavior can be essentially anywhere in your class path. In the worst case, you'll have to go through every single usage site of the annotation to find the place where its behavior is defined. (As a bonus, annotations can be annotated themselves, too - so you'll potentially have to repeat the process recursively)