Python

I used to struggle with OOP because all the explanations I saw were in terms of metaphors of real world objects. Once i started seeing OOP as a way to better structure your code, it all fell into place. If you do anything marginally complex, OO is the way to go.

The question is invalid!

Write the code that makes sense for your problem. This is not religion where choosing the wrong thing can land you in hell for eternity or whatever it is your gods will do if they don't like you. You should be mixing OO, functional, and procedural code all the time as each does some things well and some things poorly. Of course don't create a mess by the mix, but good code has a need for all 3 styles. (IIRC there are more styles the good code needs, but I can't think of what it might be at the moment)

For me it depends on the use case. If I'm designing something with an interface for someone downstream to use, I'll usually define (data)classes even if I have a functional interface.

For data science/modeling/notebooks I usually wouldn't define classes.

I think it also depends on your team; if everyone else is a functional programmer and you're writing classes or vice versa, this will undoubtedly create frictions.

Well, it's more procedural than object-oriented because it's easier to avoid object-oriented programming than procedural code :D

(Note: I wouldn't call defining classes OOP until you start using inheritance. Overriding __str__ and stuff might count, but not a lot to me.)

Personally, as time goes on, I use inheritance less.

Any language can be procedural if you insist (maybe Haskell will fight you?), creating objects is a design choice to organize the code better. Any project beyond a few hundred lines of code should probably use objects.

The language itself can be considered object oriented since it allows the typical OOP patterns.

As with most script languages, you can hit the ground running in a very procedural sort of way, as you don't even have to define a main entry point. You just start coding.

But Python certainly has an object model. If I'm not mistaken, everything in Python is an object. Like even functions.

I suppose there are some aspects of the class implementation that feel a little tacked on? Like the way you need to manage the self reference manually where it may be implicitly handled for you in other languages. At least the way you call super() now is a lot less kludgy.

One thing I miss a bit in Python is method overloading. In a general sense, function overloading is not an OOP feature per se, but I find it useful in OOP, particularly with object initializers. You can sort of achieve it with @functools.singledispatch but it's pretty janky. For initialization, I prefer keeping the __init__ method pretty rudimentary and writing factory functions to do more complex initializations. And with @dataclass, you can forego writing an __init__ altogether if you do it that way.

It supports both and depending on the situation its more procedural or more object oriented. Do you consider the standard library as part of the language and are you forced to use it? Then certainly the object oriented parts of the language would be forced to use and therefore it is object oriented. Or do you only evaluate the language and its features itself? In that case, Python supports object oriented programming with classes and objects, but you are not forced to use it.

Are we talking about the language features itself or the produced programs with it in the real world?

So regardless if you look at the language itself or the common standard library that most Python programs use, objects and classes are an part of the language. Even if you write simple procedural scripts, does not take away that Python itself is a more object oriented programming language.

Most of my objects are actually dataclasses.

I like writing Python in a relatively Functional way most of the time, with lots of list and dict comprehensions.

The language supports both, so it really depends on the user. The standard library doesn't have a clear preference, and uses both approaches, along with functional style.

So I'll say both, and my preference is a hybrid of functional and procedural.

Neither: it's a piece of shit.

If I had a gun to my head and had to answer, it'd be procedural because scopes are a lie in this language.

It's whatever you want it to be, baby.