But: “Objective-C is a great example of what is going on. Obj-C is a cool language that implements fancy message passing, but it has ugly syntax and doesn't really offer anything new to the average programmer (Python works just fine without message passing, doesn't it?).”
What I can't stand is people who don't really understand their underlying languages start to talk about them. I mean, are you kidding me jlongster? Objective-C's system is bad but Python's system is okay? Why not say you love the taste of chocolate but hate the taste of cocoa? They're performing the same function for the runtime!
I want to like Python, but its community of people who just refuse to understand how other languages relate to their favorite language really frustrates me. I'm not sure I can even count how many times a pythonista has challenged me, “What do you mean Python doesn't have real lambdas? _You don't even know Python!_” Given how important a community is to a language (see also: common lisp), it's difficult to overlook stuff like this.