How clean/elegant is Python's syntax?

[Michael Torrie]

On 05/30/2013 12:18 AM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> In some ways, Python is a more pure OOP language than Java: everything in 
> Python is an object, including classes themselves.
> 
> In other ways, Python is a less pure and more practical language. You 
> don't have to wrap every piece of functionality in a class. Python 
> encourages you to write mixed procedural, functional and object oriented 
> code, whatever is best for the problem you are trying to solve, which is 
> very much in contrast to Java.

Depending on your understanding of what object-oriented means,
procedural and functional code is still object-oriented.  In fact
modules (the "file") are in essence singleton objects that define
attributes, but in practice there can only be one instance of this
object (module).  Seems like in Java a lot of code is needed to
implement singletons (factory, etc).  module-level code (procedural
code) could simply be thought of as singleton initialization/constructor
code that's automatically run when the singleton is created, using
import or __import__().

At the function level, a simple function is still an object that
implements callable.

Python's implementation of OO isn't quite smalltalk pure, but it is much
more consistent than in Java or C++.

But yes, Python does not force you to shoe-horn your programming into
one particular pattern.