No offense intended.

The remark that "sustained object-orientation in Perl is difficult …" is just my own fancy way of saying that “treating everything as an object is difficult/manual in Perl”. Data will always enter your program in its raw primitive form, and while you can objectify it (bless it), the lack of a native type system means that your classes and methods can’t be certain of the type of data they’re being passed, which forces you into a position of defensive programming. Consider the following examples (you made a routine and you want to compare anything passed in) ...

Note: smatchmatch is experimental and not recommended for production use

sub compare_things { $_[0] ~~ $_[1] }

example #1

compare_things(1, '')

''
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example #2

compare_things('', '')

1
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example #3

compare_things(1, [])

''
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example #4

compare_things(1, bless{})

Died! Smart matching a non-overloaded object breaks encapsulation
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example #5

compare_things(0, '')

''
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example #6

Venus::Number->new(0)->eq('') # DMMT and DWIM

1
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example #7

Venus::Number->new(0)->tv('') # (tv) type and value equality

0
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example #8

Venus::Number->new(0)->eq(bless{}) # DMMT and DWIM

0
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