I've had all these same complaints about Python, and this summarizes them quite eloquently.<p>Python sorta kinds tries to be half way include objects and functional programming, but not really.  I especially agree that having to type "self." for every single member instance reference anywhere in your program is just as annoying as much of the boiler plate Java requires.  I tried using objects in Python for a while, but found that it just made things more verbose than writing procedurally.