If you want a better java look at c#, its statically typed with minor type inference but it has some support for dynamic types(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/l

If you want a better java look at c#, its statically typed with minor type inference but it has some support for dynamic types(http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264736.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd264736.aspx). Neither python nor ruby have any special support for pure functions, I suppose you could use some sort of decorator marking pure functions which one of those python subset compilers(or pypy) could use for performance optimization but I'm not aware of anything like this happening right now. Also I don't think ruby supports list comprehensions it supports oo styled higher order functions, c# without the special syntax does the same thing. You may argue this is just a syntax but list comprehensions are just syntax that , you can rewrite them with nested for loops and appends(yields in the case of generator expressions) I think in many although not all ways ruby is more of a smalltalk(but more practical). Python doesn't exactly have an exact idealogical parent, although it has ABC as a historical parent(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_%28programming_language%29). Python outside of core imperative freeform do your own thing, want to write a oo based solution sure, want to write large imperative functions, go ahead, want to use modules to organize those go ahead. Want to use named function arguments or kwargs or objects or dictionary args go ahead. You can choose to use itertools, or your own yielding functions, or generator expressions sure.