Reader Question: Python and Object Orientation

I have recently received a few questions from a reader of my books (yay!), Brett, and rather than providing a closed answer (or answers) I thought it may be useful to provide the responses in a blog post — who knows, maybe others have similar questions to Brett. I will be posting the responses in different posts, so keep in tune.

In his first question Brett asks (question abridged):

My understanding is that (almost) every programming language is paradigm-independent (… they) can be used to code in a OOP fashion, procedural…