And your reply is half right, half wrong. Let me address the wrong parts.

> Duck typing vs. abstract base classes / You can do both in Python

I'm saying that the original intent of Python was duck typing, but then people realized that abstract base classes play an important role - e.g. isinstance() testing, static type annotations. So they still ended up where Java started.

> Static type hints / I don't even know what that means.

I'm saying that Python was designed with no type annotations on variables (though values did have types), and then they realized that people wanted this feature... and ended up where C/C++/Java/C# have been all along. Python became "enterprisey".

And then, Python implemented type hints rather badly from 3.0 through 3.10 and beyond. It doesn't include types in the official documentation, so now you have to guess what open() returns (it's typing.BinaryIO/typing.TextIO). It doesn't have an official type checker, instead relying on third-party tools like mypy. It moved items between typing and collections.abc. It requires `from future import __annotations__` for non-trivial programs. It changed typing.List to just list in 3.9. It introduced the | (union) operator in 3.10. And a bunch more little things I can't recall; it just had a bad out-of-the-box experience and kept tweaking things over the decade. Documenting generics and especially protocols in Python takes effort.

> Python was created in 1989. Java was created in 1996

Wrong. Java was created in 1991, and the first version released in 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)

Python 1 was released in 1994, and 2 in 2000. They had their chance to make breaking changes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Python

While you're right that Python predates Java, it's not by as many years as claimed.

> Various OOP concepts that are much better explained in Java than Python

To exemplify, here is how you figure out how to override `==`: https://docs.python.org/3/library/stdtypes.html#comparisons , https://docs.python.org/3/reference/expressions.html#express... . Notably, there is no documentation for object.__eq__().

Here is the Java version: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/23/docs/api/java.base...

Now for __hash__() / hashCode(), the Java version is clearer: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__... , https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/23/docs/api/java.base...

Python __del__ is buried in the "Data model" page: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#object.__... . Java's finalize() is easily found on Object: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/23/docs/api/java.base... . Furthermore, Joshua Bloch's book "Effective Java" has a chapter titled "Avoid finalizers and cleaners" that explains in detail why finalizers are problematic.

Python explains a lot less about weakref than Java: https://docs.python.org/3/library/weakref.html , https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/lang/ref/pack...

> Java is a pure-OO language

Extremely wrong. Java has primitive numeric types, which do not have methods or fields, and undergo painful boxing/unboxing conversions to interoperate with the OO world. Whether the performance benefits are worth it or not is debatable, but what's not debatable is that Java is not pure OOP. Some say that Java is a bad copy of Smalltalk, which I heard is fully object-oriented.

> Python is a procedural language with OO as an optional feature

Wrong. Every Python value is an object that can be inspected (dir(), .__dict__, etc.). And in the CPython API, every Python value is a PyObject*. I have ample grounds to believe that Python is more OO than Java.