> Nor do I find charming the belligerent lack of any magical syntactic sugar for `self`. Does Python force you to pass it as an argument to make some kind of clever point?

On the class, you can call the method like a normal function (passing the self arg manually). Seems like a nice connection to just raw functions. Also explains how you can add methods after a class has been defined (set a function on it, whose first param is a class instance).