That's not really true. Quite a few (more or less) OO languages have something conceptualy very similar. A "with object" construct. Something like

with (some expression returning object)
  .method1(params)
  .method2(params)
  .method2(params)
end with
[download]

That's conceptualy very close to $_. It's also a way to save keystrokes by assigning a value to a special variable/construct if you want to use it a few times in a row. Perl just takes this a little further. And ... no matter what trolls say ... it works.