Once a machine intelligence equal of greater to ourselves in terms of problem solving ability is development, what do you believe it's status as a citizen should be? The Night Angel
Well, I'm posting using NS6 =) It choked on the first run on my machine (p200 64M RH6.1) but once I made it past the introduction screens and onto regular web pages she seems to be sailing smooth. Aaah, now all we need is a real time translator for M$ Windows Media formats and we're set =) The Night Angel
Whatever. Yeah, printf is pretty hard to optimize further than it currently is. But if you had written your program in machine language from the beginning you would have a completely different architecture that an equivelent program written in C. Maybe it wouldn't be 50x faster but it would be an order of magnitude faster at least. But this it isn't worth the effort, with Moore's law, who gives a damn - wait 18 months. Anyway, you didn't dispute a specialized computer vs. a general one. Think of how many more data blocks you'd be through on your SETI@Home account if you had a mini-refrigerator sized analog fast fourier transform computer plugged into your machine. The Night Angel
Ahem. Can someone retag the above post so it belongs to me? =) I have cookies turned off in my browser. I previewed my post once and the preview page had me marked as being logged in (as I entered my name & password on the original feedback screen). Then when I submitted it, lo and behold I went down in history as an anonymous coward. Heheh. Guess that makes me one of those ingenious fools to discover a crack like this;) The Night Angel
Why not? Of course you wouldn't be the same after a transfer, your right, you would not have a lot of the same body. But, the top 10% of the nervous system if transfered I would call a successful mind transfer. The bottom 90% simply collates the noise into signals for the top 10% anyway;). I don't see merging intuitively when dealing with physical bodies either. However, if you assume that beings are existing in a virtual world (enough of them to make it a society) then the rules of reality would be much more mutable. Think of it as a MUD on steroids. The Night Angel
I do not wish to die. That's quite a petulant little statement, but understandable considering that my DNA imposes that desire upon me. Those who didn't share that wish didn't contribute to my DNA (for those anthropomorphist's out there =). I consider myself lucky in a way, I have a realistic hope that within my lifetime a means to sidestep death may appear. Unfortunately, I don't believe I'll be able to escape the reaper completely. I say this because the only logical means I can see to escape death would be to transfer my identity onto another substrate. But the transfer doesn't mean that the old substrate (my current flesh and bone) won't experience death, just that a copy of myself lives on. Perhaps a way around this would be to replace the structure of my mind neuron-by-neuron so that I would simply not percieve the changeover point, but I digress, the transfer itself leads me to what I see as a larger issue: forking. Consider the situation where I first created a copy of myself, the old me gets up off the table and the new me stretches within it's new form. There are now two versions of me. From the instant the transfer is complete and the new me activated, we begin to experience separate histories. Throw away all the distracting side issues like who owns the house now, and concentrate instead on the core of this new existance - what am I? Consider the opposite of the transfer/forking as well, what about the merging of two me's into one? (an extreme extension of this of course would be Borg, but let's just keep to me here). What I'm getting at is would I still be human? By merging multiple instances of myself, I experience the world in a parallel manner - not something that current humanity is familiar with. What of accidents or intentional destructions of my copies, is it murder? I still live, I only lost a few days of divergent memories. Incomplete copies are also a branch to explore, sending an embassary with only the information they need to know would be a prudent choice. I don't have any answers here, only more questions. I know, absolutely, however that at the first reasonable opportunity in the future that I will attempt to answer some of these wonders.
I think and my thoughts cross the barrier, just as the good doctor intended. But sometimes, thoughts cross back - cold, dark, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen. I willed a copy into existence, (m)he would stay behind to hold them off a little while longer for us. Many times I have done this, without a thought for the one I left behind. This time, I am left as I see myself leaving. When one can look beyond the crass demands of flesh and bone, beyond the goals of the self to percieve the goals of the group then one has achieved true enlightenment. We are Borg. You will be assimilated. Mommy, when I grow up I want my shell torn away from my intellect and my mind shoved into the cradle of a ramjet so I can begin the thousand year journey to Andromeda. At least relativity compresses the boredom. Program yourself, practice a level 1 biofeedback loop. Compress the perception of time - do this by not thinking. Thinking creates memory traces, these traces are interpreted by our conciousness as passage of time. Once an individual achives Zen, large spans of time can be passed instantly as no memorys were laid throughout it. The Night Angel. I'm already there.
Instead of your frantic whining from your brittle point of view, you could have instead explored the notion that science itself is a religion. When it comes down to it, science cannot prove itself - we must take it on faith that science describes our Universe. Mathematics is the basis of science, and this base has not been linked to our Universe, it just so happens that it describes our Universe fairly accurately - this is why science is based on belief.
I hope that Python or something like it simplify's things in the mid future. Surprising to see a couple of the names on this list (NASA?! Mission Control?!), this gives me reassurance that Python will at least exist for 5 more years (Government is slow to change decisions already made). DARPA is funding the whole shebang for Python. It was accepted under this proposal called - Computer Programming for Everyone. Python is so open because Mr. Guido van Rossum has left it unrestricted attempting to help it gain acceptance. Van Rossum believes in what he's doing, he's one of the (few) people I admire and respect in terms of integrity alone. CP4E aims to establish Python (Or an improved version of it, or something completely different later on - whatever is best) as the primary language taught to our children in school. I admire this goal and I believe as GvR seems to that this new form of "literacy" will reap untold rewards. These are my opinions, please do not construe anything I say as a statement of Mr. Van Rossum's. If in doubt email him, he does answer all his email (patience though - you never know how many emails he has on his plate at any given moment). The Night Angel
From the message I was replying to: "I think you are presenting a false dichotomy of 'spaghetti code' vs. 'OO'. The majority of code is neither - it is relatively clean, structured procedural code. In other words, large tasks are decomposed into smaller tasks (recursively) until small, understandable functions are reached. No encapsulation needed. Spaghetti code is code that uses a lot of GOTO's (or jumps) - typically written in BASIC or assembler. Structured code can be viewed as a hierarchy of black boxes with defined inputs and outputs; spaghetti code cannot. The transition to structured code took place (mostly) long before OO." The context of the message implies that the programmer is extending the language through ideas a programmer uses while programming, I read the above description and I see an object hierarchy with encapsulated modules within it. The language and the compiler do not enforce this - the programmer does. Outside of this context what I said begins to lose sense. I have my own experience doing this, on my old Amiga, using a language called AMOS I programmed a GUI. AMOS was a dialect of basic with some nice (for the time) graphic extensions. All the code for my GUI was written in a procedural langauage, but all the logic & data were object based. I wrote a minidatabase for the GUI to use which stored qualitive data - it had routines to pack itself to disk and rebuild from the same that does in effect what serializing does in Java and pickling does in Python. The Night Angel
Yeah your right, Java is more limited that Python but the comparison wasn't meant to be taken completely literally =) I couldn't find parametric polymorphism on a quick seach of Python's site (Using InfoSeek's search written in Python;) I'll try to find it in the next few days, if it isn't there I guess I'll have to petition it for 1.6 (or add it to my own local source;), I would like to add my objects together. In Python everything including functions are first order types. Allows for some neat aliasing and extending that idea, truely generic routines that can be applied to any data (even code;). What do you think about simplicity though? Every once in a while I do believe we need to collapse everything we know so that we can begin to explore with a solid footing again. Do you think Python (or Perl!) does this? The Night Angel
Your right when you state that the best languages are multi-paradigm. Just because I learned the word "paradigm" doesn't mean I have to forget "different way of thinking" even if my signal-to-noise ratio is higher. Python is multi-paradigm. It has a complete object model but it is not enforced - you can program it simple batch (script other code), pre-procedurally, procedurally, object wise, or hybrids of all. Python is not strict. it doesn't force you to enter fifteen lines to define an object that tells STOUT "Hello World" - you simply enter print "Hello World" as you would in a pre-procedural language (Early Basic's, primitive subroutine support; no support for local variables the norm). If you choose to use them however, objects are there - for that moment when you need to express a subtle nuance that just isn't the same without them. I believe in the right tool for the job, and Python is a darn good swiss army knife. C++ objects suck crap. The only reason it has accomplished anything is through the intelligence of the programmers using it. If it is brittle - your not encapsulating it; if it is not encapsulated - it cannot be object based. Please do not confuse a bad implementation with a bad idea, the world is still recovering from C++'s poisoning the well. Your right to an extent when you say people are pattern based, but if your going to say that Perl's extension of grep's regular expression matching can contain me then I'll slap you upside the head with a large trout (We'll have to meet in IRC though =). I am more than patterns, I'm structured patterns at the least. Until a working machine intelligence is demonstrated to the world at large then nobody can pretend to know the basis of the homunculi (or those little fragments of personality that when fractally combined form a deep and responsive system - intentionally too much noise;). I don't know what else to say. You have me stumped, if you don't believe objects are a good thing I must simply assume you need someone to help you go back over the territory to find the supporting knowledge that you missed. But then again you simply may not need objects for the work you currently do - in that case Python will let you program procedurally.
I see where you're coming from but I still stand by my original post. Heh, my first home computer was a Commodore 64 and assembly (high level logic circuits =) was my first language. Your absolutely right when you say C is not object orientated, but consider encapsulation as an idea not as a design feature, I assert that black box == encapsulated.
Oops =) Please accept my apologies, "crazy category theory and monads..", Category theory send me down the wrong branches and I arrived at monods first.
Monads? Do you mean Monod's named after Jacques Monod? Here's a short excerpt out of Metamagical Thema's by Douglas R. Hofstadter (ISBN:0-465-04540-5, compilation of material published 1981-1983) where he discusses Monod's work (from the chapter titled: "Waking Up from the Boolean Dream"): "... Categories do not point to specific physical objects. However, they can be used as "masters" from which copies - instances - can be rubbed, and then those copies are activated in various conjunctions; these activations then automatically trigger other instance-symbols into activations of various sorts (teams of ants triggering the creation of other teams of ants, sometimes themselves fizzling out). The overall activity will be semantic - meaningful - if it is isomorphic, not necessarily to some actual event in the real world, but to some event that is compatible with all the known constraints on the situation. ..." That's quite a nice little description of the ideas that led to object orientated programming. As you can see, we owe a debt of thanks to Ants =). The proof of the above paragraph is simply the computer you are sitting in front of. Your operating system is not a tangled mass of spaghetti code because oop provides encapsulation (or individual ants) to prevent that. You don't need to know these proofs to write programs today, at the time however these proofs were needed to convince people to adopt the new way of thinking. I do not belive that you expressed complete understanding of these things in your reply to my original post. I assure you that I do understand these theory's as I am a curious old fogie. The point is, I've evaluated Python and have decided that it is a worthy language not only because it implements a complete set of ideas from the "bullsh*t side of CS langauge theory" but also because it is Borg. And you will be assimilated. As to how it all relates to Java, well... At the core of both languages is a strong object model, these models are almost identical just differently named. Python has the monkier of a scripting language because it does not enforce the usage of the object model. Java on the other hand is strict, and forces a complete definition for even the most trival program. Both languages come with an adequate set of supporting librarys as well, Java has Sun's "standard" extensions and Python has modules. The Borg in Python is in how it's modules interact with other software. Python supports practically every component and communication standard in existance (COM, DDE,...). This means that the programmer can access and use a very large base of existing code. Java is more crippled in this respect, Sun produces the extensions internally and based on their own priorities. It is trivial to gain the functionality of outside components in Python, it assimilates existing code with ease, often only requiring a simple wrapper. Java's strictness in it's language definition seems to extend into its librarys as well, and it's not so easy to extend in the manner you see fit (Re, Sun vs. Microsoft but as Python is completely Open Source it does not share the ethical considerations of this example - no self interests). Mark Twain is reputed to have said "History doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.". We've gone though a very explosive period over the last few decades, over the next few years I expect to see simplification of the successful ideas of this past explosive period. Then we'll do it all over again. It is my firm opinion that Python and other tools like it embody the beginning of this wave. Python isn't about style its about ensuring that the multibillion dollar system you wrap it around follows the KISS philosophy (Keep It Simple Stupid) and therefore is simply less likely to be broken. I wish I had made it further into my Perl evaluation, but it is too obtuse for me, and I am old and fall asleep early.
Software Carpentry is running a contest with $200000 in prizes to be given away. Of course the final product will be coded in Python but that doesn't mean you can't prototype in Perl (although in a close match...). Heh, I see a ton of Perl vs Python articles, it amazes me how people can completely miss the point. Research Python a bit. Research Java a bit. Python is a more flexible Java. Python's support librarys are inherited from too many open source projects to mention. Java has a ton of Sun proprietary standard extensions. Plus hopefully the one you want coming soon =) Sorry to be a bit off topic here, but go check out the above site for the money, the tools they want to develop will benefit the entire open source community regardless of language. And of course if you want to check out Python, go here.
Slashdot Mirror
Once a machine intelligence equal of greater to ourselves in terms of problem solving ability is development, what do you believe it's status as a citizen should be?
The Night Angel
NS6 passes with flying colors at the W3C CSS Level 1 test battery. A few misrenders but a lot better than IE.
The Night Angel
Well, I'm posting using NS6 =) It choked on the first run on my machine (p200 64M RH6.1) but once I made it past the introduction screens and onto regular web pages she seems to be sailing smooth. Aaah, now all we need is a real time translator for M$ Windows Media formats and we're set =) The Night Angel
=) Oh!!! Well structured and blocked C!. Heheh, you don't work for MicroSoft then =)
The Night Angel.
Whatever. Yeah, printf is pretty hard to optimize further than it currently is. But if you had written your program in machine language from the beginning you would have a completely different architecture that an equivelent program written in C. Maybe it wouldn't be 50x faster but it would be an order of magnitude faster at least. But this it isn't worth the effort, with Moore's law, who gives a damn - wait 18 months.
Anyway, you didn't dispute a specialized computer vs. a general one. Think of how many more data blocks you'd be through on your SETI@Home account if you had a mini-refrigerator sized analog fast fourier transform computer plugged into your machine.
The Night Angel
Ahem. Can someone retag the above post so it belongs to me? =) I have cookies turned off in my browser. I previewed my post once and the preview page had me marked as being logged in (as I entered my name & password on the original feedback screen). Then when I submitted it, lo and behold I went down in history as an anonymous coward. Heheh. ;)
Guess that makes me one of those ingenious fools to discover a crack like this
The Night Angel
Why not? ;).
Of course you wouldn't be the same after a transfer, your right, you would not have a lot of the same body. But, the top 10% of the nervous system if transfered I would call a successful mind transfer. The bottom 90% simply collates the noise into signals for the top 10% anyway
I don't see merging intuitively when dealing with physical bodies either. However, if you assume that beings are existing in a virtual world (enough of them to make it a society) then the rules of reality would be much more mutable. Think of it as a MUD on steroids.
The Night Angel
Yup. But I was thinking this stuff 5 years ago, and Turing before me 60 years ago. I'm much calmer on the subject today ;).
The Night Angel
Yeah, I know, I can't connect to them either. Their server keeps refusing the connection?!?
I do not wish to die. That's quite a petulant little statement, but understandable considering that my DNA imposes that desire upon me. Those who didn't share that wish didn't contribute to my DNA (for those anthropomorphist's out there =). I consider myself lucky in a way, I have a realistic hope that within my lifetime a means to sidestep death may appear.
Unfortunately, I don't believe I'll be able to escape the reaper completely. I say this because the only logical means I can see to escape death would be to transfer my identity onto another substrate. But the transfer doesn't mean that the old substrate (my current flesh and bone) won't experience death, just that a copy of myself lives on. Perhaps a way around this would be to replace the structure of my mind neuron-by-neuron so that I would simply not percieve the changeover point, but I digress, the transfer itself leads me to what I see as a larger issue: forking.
Consider the situation where I first created a copy of myself, the old me gets up off the table and the new me stretches within it's new form. There are now two versions of me. From the instant the transfer is complete and the new me activated, we begin to experience separate histories.
Throw away all the distracting side issues like who owns the house now, and concentrate instead on the core of this new existance - what am I?
Consider the opposite of the transfer/forking as well, what about the merging of two me's into one? (an extreme extension of this of course would be Borg, but let's just keep to me here). What I'm getting at is would I still be human? By merging multiple instances of myself, I experience the world in a parallel manner - not something that current humanity is familiar with. What of accidents or intentional destructions of my copies, is it murder? I still live, I only lost a few days of divergent memories. Incomplete copies are also a branch to explore, sending an embassary with only the information they need to know would be a prudent choice.
I don't have any answers here, only more questions. I know, absolutely, however that at the first reasonable opportunity in the future that I will attempt to answer some of these wonders.
The Night Angel.
I think and my thoughts cross the barrier, just as the good doctor intended. But sometimes, thoughts cross back - cold, dark, alien. Evolution is at work here, but just what is evolving remains to be seen.
I willed a copy into existence, (m)he would stay behind to hold them off a little while longer for us. Many times I have done this, without a thought for the one I left behind. This time, I am left as I see myself leaving.
When one can look beyond the crass demands of flesh and bone, beyond the goals of the self to percieve the goals of the group then one has achieved true enlightenment.
We are Borg. You will be assimilated.
Mommy, when I grow up I want my shell torn away from my intellect and my mind shoved into the cradle of a ramjet so I can begin the thousand year journey to Andromeda. At least relativity compresses the boredom.
Program yourself, practice a level 1 biofeedback loop. Compress the perception of time - do this by not thinking. Thinking creates memory traces, these traces are interpreted by our conciousness as passage of time. Once an individual achives Zen, large spans of time can be passed instantly as no memorys were laid throughout it.
The Night Angel.
I'm already there.
Instead of your frantic whining from your brittle point of view, you could have instead explored the notion that science itself is a religion. When it comes down to it, science cannot prove itself - we must take it on faith that science describes our Universe. Mathematics is the basis of science, and this base has not been linked to our Universe, it just so happens that it describes our Universe fairly accurately - this is why science is based on belief.
I hope that Python or something like it simplify's things in the mid future. Surprising to see a couple of the names on this list (NASA?! Mission Control?!), this gives me reassurance that Python will at least exist for 5 more years (Government is slow to change decisions already made). DARPA is funding the whole shebang for Python. It was accepted under this proposal called - Computer Programming for Everyone. Python is so open because Mr. Guido van Rossum has left it unrestricted attempting to help it gain acceptance. Van Rossum believes in what he's doing, he's one of the (few) people I admire and respect in terms of integrity alone. CP4E aims to establish Python (Or an improved version of it, or something completely different later on - whatever is best) as the primary language taught to our children in school. I admire this goal and I believe as GvR seems to that this new form of "literacy" will reap untold rewards.
These are my opinions, please do not construe anything I say as a statement of Mr. Van Rossum's. If in doubt email him, he does answer all his email (patience though - you never know how many emails he has on his plate at any given moment).
The Night Angel
You leave me no choice but to respect that. =)
The Night Angel
And pass the gravy.
The Night Angel.
From the message I was replying to:
"I think you are presenting a false dichotomy of 'spaghetti code' vs. 'OO'. The majority of code is neither - it is relatively clean, structured procedural code. In other words, large tasks are decomposed into smaller tasks (recursively) until small, understandable functions are reached. No encapsulation needed.
Spaghetti code is code that uses a lot of GOTO's (or jumps) - typically written in BASIC or assembler. Structured code can be viewed as a hierarchy of black boxes with defined inputs and outputs; spaghetti code cannot. The transition to structured code took place (mostly) long before OO."
The context of the message implies that the programmer is extending the language through ideas a programmer uses while programming, I read the above description and I see an object hierarchy with encapsulated modules within it. The language and the compiler do not enforce this - the programmer does. Outside of this context what I said begins to lose sense.
I have my own experience doing this, on my old Amiga, using a language called AMOS I programmed a GUI. AMOS was a dialect of basic with some nice (for the time) graphic extensions. All the code for my GUI was written in a procedural langauage, but all the logic & data were object based. I wrote a minidatabase for the GUI to use which stored qualitive data - it had routines to pack itself to disk and rebuild from the same that does in effect what serializing does in Java and pickling does in Python.
The Night Angel
Yeah your right, Java is more limited that Python but the comparison wasn't meant to be taken completely literally =) ;) I'll try to find it in the next few days, if it isn't there I guess I'll have to petition it for 1.6 (or add it to my own local source ;), I would like to add my objects together. ;).
I couldn't find parametric polymorphism on a quick seach of Python's site (Using InfoSeek's search written in Python
In Python everything including functions are first order types. Allows for some neat aliasing and extending that idea, truely generic routines that can be applied to any data (even code
What do you think about simplicity though? Every once in a while I do believe we need to collapse everything we know so that we can begin to explore with a solid footing again. Do you think Python (or Perl!) does this?
The Night Angel
Your right when you state that the best languages are multi-paradigm. Just because I learned the word "paradigm" doesn't mean I have to forget "different way of thinking" even if my signal-to-noise ratio is higher. Python is multi-paradigm. It has a complete object model but it is not enforced - you can program it simple batch (script other code), pre-procedurally, procedurally, object wise, or hybrids of all. ;).
Python is not strict. it doesn't force you to enter fifteen lines to define an object that tells STOUT "Hello World" - you simply enter print "Hello World" as you would in a pre-procedural language (Early Basic's, primitive subroutine support; no support for local variables the norm). If you choose to use them however, objects are there - for that moment when you need to express a subtle nuance that just isn't the same without them. I believe in the right tool for the job, and Python is a darn good swiss army knife.
C++ objects suck crap. The only reason it has accomplished anything is through the intelligence of the programmers using it. If it is brittle - your not encapsulating it; if it is not encapsulated - it cannot be object based. Please do not confuse a bad implementation with a bad idea, the world is still recovering from C++'s poisoning the well.
Your right to an extent when you say people are pattern based, but if your going to say that Perl's extension of grep's regular expression matching can contain me then I'll slap you upside the head with a large trout (We'll have to meet in IRC though =). I am more than patterns, I'm structured patterns at the least. Until a working machine intelligence is demonstrated to the world at large then nobody can pretend to know the basis of the homunculi (or those little fragments of personality that when fractally combined form a deep and responsive system - intentionally too much noise
I don't know what else to say. You have me stumped, if you don't believe objects are a good thing I must simply assume you need someone to help you go back over the territory to find the supporting knowledge that you missed. But then again you simply may not need objects for the work you currently do - in that case Python will let you program procedurally.
Sincerely,
The Night Angel
I see where you're coming from but I still stand by my original post. Heh, my first home computer was a Commodore 64 and assembly (high level logic circuits =) was my first language. Your absolutely right when you say C is not object orientated, but consider encapsulation as an idea not as a design feature, I assert that black box == encapsulated.
Oops =) Please accept my apologies, "crazy category theory and monads..", Category theory send me down the wrong branches and I arrived at monods first.
Well darn. I stand corrected, thank you for clearing it up =)
ROFL =)
But if Anonymous Cowards always lie and you are an Anonymous coward then your telling the truth.. but Anonymous Cowards always lie...
Monads? Do you mean Monod's named after Jacques Monod?
..." ...). This means that the programmer can access and use a very large base of existing code. Java is more crippled in this respect, Sun produces the extensions internally and based on their own priorities. It is trivial to gain the functionality of outside components in Python, it assimilates existing code with ease, often only requiring a simple wrapper. Java's strictness in it's language definition seems to extend into its librarys as well, and it's not so easy to extend in the manner you see fit (Re, Sun vs. Microsoft but as Python is completely Open Source it does not share the ethical considerations of this example - no self interests).
Here's a short excerpt out of Metamagical Thema's by Douglas R. Hofstadter (ISBN:0-465-04540-5, compilation of material published 1981-1983) where he discusses Monod's work (from the chapter titled: "Waking Up from the Boolean Dream"):
"...
Categories do not point to specific physical objects. However, they can be used as "masters" from which copies - instances - can be rubbed, and then those copies are activated in various conjunctions; these activations then automatically trigger other instance-symbols into activations of various sorts (teams of ants triggering the creation of other teams of ants, sometimes themselves fizzling out). The overall activity will be semantic - meaningful - if it is isomorphic, not necessarily to some actual event in the real world, but to some event that is compatible with all the known constraints on the situation.
That's quite a nice little description of the ideas that led to object orientated programming. As you can see, we owe a debt of thanks to Ants =). The proof of the above paragraph is simply the computer you are sitting in front of. Your operating system is not a tangled mass of spaghetti code because oop provides encapsulation (or individual ants) to prevent that. You don't need to know these proofs to write programs today, at the time however these proofs were needed to convince people to adopt the new way of thinking. I do not belive that you expressed complete understanding of these things in your reply to my original post. I assure you that I do understand these theory's as I am a curious old fogie.
The point is, I've evaluated Python and have decided that it is a worthy language not only because it implements a complete set of ideas from the "bullsh*t side of CS langauge theory" but also because it is Borg. And you will be assimilated.
As to how it all relates to Java, well... At the core of both languages is a strong object model, these models are almost identical just differently named. Python has the monkier of a scripting language because it does not enforce the usage of the object model. Java on the other hand is strict, and forces a complete definition for even the most trival program. Both languages come with an adequate set of supporting librarys as well, Java has Sun's "standard" extensions and Python has modules.
The Borg in Python is in how it's modules interact with other software. Python supports practically every component and communication standard in existance (COM, DDE,
Mark Twain is reputed to have said "History doesn't repeat itself but it sure does rhyme.". We've gone though a very explosive period over the last few decades, over the next few years I expect to see simplification of the successful ideas of this past explosive period. Then we'll do it all over again. It is my firm opinion that Python and other tools like it embody the beginning of this wave. Python isn't about style its about ensuring that the multibillion dollar system you wrap it around follows the KISS philosophy (Keep It Simple Stupid) and therefore is simply less likely to be broken.
I wish I had made it further into my Perl evaluation, but it is too obtuse for me, and I am old and fall asleep early.
The Night Angel.
Software Carpentry is running a contest with $200000 in prizes to be given away. Of course the final product will be coded in Python but that doesn't mean you can't prototype in Perl (although in a close match...).
Heh, I see a ton of Perl vs Python articles, it amazes me how people can completely miss the point. Research Python a bit. Research Java a bit. Python is a more flexible Java. Python's support librarys are inherited from too many open source projects to mention. Java has a ton of Sun proprietary standard extensions. Plus hopefully the one you want coming soon =) Sorry to be a bit off topic here, but go check out the above site for the money, the tools they want to develop will benefit the entire open source community regardless of language.
And of course if you want to check out Python, go here.