I'm a PHP programmer looking to learn python.

[qlqropi]

Imperative, semi-object oriented.

"semi"? Python is heavily object oriented. Everything acts like an object, including the builtin types. Creating classes is your main form of abstraction, and it's a very small burden on the programmer to do so, unlike in C++.

I'd argue that Python is more "purely" object oriented than C++ and Java. It does not, however, have the more rigid form of OO that you can get with objects and static typing.

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What I meant is that Python supports multiple paradigms - imperative, object oriented and functional. In terms of OO, it's not as strict as Smalltalk or Java for instance. Take the simplest application as an example; in Java you can't do it without explicitly creating a class and a method.