[duncanfwalker]

For me the point is that __init__ is special - it's the language's the way to construct an object. If we want to side-effecting code we can with a non-special static constructor like

class Foo @classmethod def connect(): return Foo()._connect()

The benefit is that we can choose when we're doing 1) object construction, 2) side-effecting 3) both. The downside is client might try use the __init__() so object creation might need to be documented more than it would otherwise

[rcxdude]

Init isn't really special (especially compared to e.g. __new__). It has no special privileges, it's just a method that is called when you construct an instance of the class.