I've been a programming dabbler on an off for the past sixteen years or so (not counting the year I learned Apple Basic as a kid). I've recently gotten heavily back into programming for a couple of largish personal projects; most recently a event aggregator for the community where I live. For the last project, I decided to take a stab at doing OO Perl because too often I found that my procedural code for larger projects often degraded into spaghetti code as I dropped in more and more code to address all the edge cases that inevitably cropped up.

Fortunately, I had worked some with "old school" OO Perl in the past, just to get familiar with it. I had also played a little with other OO-oriented languages so was pretty familiar with most of the concepts. Still, I had to dig out my worn copy Damian Conway's "Object Oriented Perl" book written back in 2000 to refresh myself. But after writing a fairly modest program with old school OO Perl, it became apparent that it's probably not practical for a less experienced programmer like me to use old school OO Perl for bigger, more complex projects like the event aggregator I was trying to build. I had to waste too much effort worrying about whether I was using Perl properly to implement OO design and grok all kinds of advanced programming techniques to make it all work.

Then some Monks here recommended that I try Moose. I had never heard of Moose but, man, I am extremely glad I took their advice. Over the past month or so that I have been working with Moose, I found it to take a lot of the tedium out of programming and it has made it a much more joyful and less frustrating experience for me. When I see my code taking on the form of stringified pasta, I can easily break the code down into discrete chunks that makes it much easier for me to focus on the big picture of the program's structure and less on the detailed ins and outs of what the code is doing. I have a lot left to learn with Moose but there seems to be little question at this point in time that Moose will make me a better, more productive programmer and will help me create much more maintainable code. I can't see myself using anything but Moose for all but the simplest of scripts.

I'm wondering if other Monks who have tried Moose have similar feelings as me. Maybe I was just horrible procedural programmer. Have you tried Moose and then abandoned it? Right now I don't see any downsides to using it (my scripts don't have to run fast), but I'd be interested to know if you have a different take on Moose. Are there any limitations inherent to Moose that I should be aware of?