[kjeetgill]

I think you're being pretty uncharitable with that interpretation of educator's incentives.

That said, I think valuing relative beginners and non-programmers into the fold is and will be a strong point of the python ecosystem. It has fewer of R's excentricities and some of Java's straight forwardness while remaining relatively terse and to the point.

I think this addition would absolutely cut down on very frustrating boilerplate. The question is the cost to the ecosystem which is going to come down to speculation in any direction.

My opinion: no one change like this hurts a language much at all but the fear comes from the death of a thousand cuts.

This feature does two things: adds slightly crypic syntax which is very obvious to career programmers but somewhat opaque and unmemorable to anyone else.

Worse, it makes bad patterns convenient. Deep None filled object hierarchies (though occasionally unavoidable) will always be problematic in some way. This only serves to make those idiomatic.