It is true that my answer elides over some things, but the underlying point is that there isn't a real comparison available between languages because in Java you should pretty much never need this. Yes, technically you could work yourself into a position where you might need that question answered and have to go through the reflection, but that is truly a last resort, whereas in Python it's sort of the first.<p>(I say "sort of" because even in Python this is a weird thing; the traditional answer to the question "can I call this as a function" is to simply try it and catch the exception if it fails.)