You've sold me on it. I wasn't able to read a single example and know which ones were merely repeated method calls to the same object and which were successively deeper objects. In fact, I know that all the SOAP examples come with cascaded method calls but I never knew that in reality it wasn't just some deeply nested object being worked with. I always thought that, actually. That's because all the examples used the syntax for working with deep objects - ala A->B->C->D.

If you can write code that looks really damn legible and still completely throw me on what it means, its a bad idea. There isn't anything I can do to distinguish chained self-returning methods and chained successivly deeper object returning methods. This is just entirely bad practice because it is unreadable. If a person really means to call multiple methods against the same object, there are nice functional ways to do this that don't look like something else. multiple method calls against the same object, revisited has perfectly reasonable syntax to support this desire and it isn't going to be completely obfuscatory. Given my opinions on this, I think a programmer would have to be irresponsible to use chained self-returning method calls.

my $window = call_on_obj(
    Gtk2::Window->new( "toplevel" ),
    [ signal_connect   => ( delete_event => sub { Gtk2->main_quit } ) 
+],
    [ set_title        => "Test" ],
    [ set_border_width => 15 ],
    [ add              => call_on_obj(
        Gtk2::Button->new( "Quit" ),
        [ signal_connect => ( clicked => sub { Gtk2->main_quit } ) ],
    ) ],
    [ 'show_all' ],
);
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