When I talk about duck typing, I'm talking more about getattr and hasattr (explicit or implicit) rather than the everything-is-an-object structure under the hoo

When I talk about duck typing, I'm talking more about getattr and hasattr (explicit or implicit) rather than the everything-is-an-object structure under the hood. For example, you can invoke "foo()" on any thing no matter the type, and it'll work so long as you have "foo()" declared for the instance. You can't do that in many "OO-heavy" languages like C++ or Java. The advantage here is that in Python you don't have to explicit interfaces and base classes in order to achieve polymorphism. You make a good point though-- the "duck typing" stuff is actually a consequence of Python using objects. Interesting: the "duck typing" paradigm should be able to be ported to other languages like Java then...