I was a long time C++ guy, and when I moved to Boston I took a job at an OO perl shop (openair.com). Most of the pople (maybe all) had previously been C++ people. I interviewed dozens of people for engineering jobs while I was there, and most of the had moved from some other OO language to perl. The reason I think this works better than the other way around is because you learn stricter OO habits in strict OO languages. Perl doesn't enforce them, so you aren't likely to 'discover' them by yourself. If you already have the hibts, however, it is very easy to figure out where to put your singletons, visitors, and other patterns in perl

While I was there the codebase grew from approx 25k of semi-OO perl to over 200k lines of heavily OO industrial perl. Being in perl allowed for very rapid development, much faster than would have been possible under C++. You sacrifice some security by using perl, namely that the compiler can't catch mistakes in argument passing - you have to wait to runtime. The advantage was that each developer would add 2-3k _per month_ (they have a monthly release cycle).

Perl6 seems to address some of these issues and looks like it will be even more attractive to possible C++/Java converts in the years to come.

-jackdied