Now that I have a chance to ask: I've always found the def __init__ method with 4 (!) underscores one of the ugliest things I've seen in a programming language. Don't get me wrong: I like Python and know it's truly good, but __why__??
The second annoyance is that you need to write __init__ methods quite often. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there doesn't seem to be built-in support in Python for having attributes initialized by the the constructor. For example in Perl 6, I can write class Point { has $.x; has $.y; } ... and I get a constructor Pair.new(x => 1, y => 42) for free, no need to write custom initializers.
class Foo:
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
self.__dict__.update(**kwargs)
If you still want to keep a strict list of allowed attributes, you can define them as parameters, and use a shortcut to assign all local variables to attributes.
class Foo:
def __init__(self, name, age):
self.__dict__.update(locals())
del self.self
This isn't recommended though. So for all practical purposes, Python does require a bit of boilerplate in the constructor.
Edit: Realized a cleaner way to do the second example.