Yeah, this was discussed recently by you and I in a reply (Re^7: Curious about Perl's strengths in 2018) to the original discussion posted by Crosis. There were a lot of interesting topics discussed in this long (and at times meandering) discussion thread.

Apparently, someone in the Python project did some repenting, too. The Python 3 (and, it seems, Python 2) OO system appears to have been redone since Larry stole from Python. (see https://realpython.com/python3-object-oriented-programming/)

What exactly? ? ?

update

I read all of it and this is semantically almost identical.

Larry just reused package for class ° and added more freedom:

• you can choose the name of your constructor(s) (usuall new)
• you can bless any reference as instance container not only hashes
• you won't have collisions between methods and instance vars
• class attributes don't collide with object attributes

Actually you can translate this whole tutorial almost 1-to-1 with a bit of syntactic sugar!

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice}

°) python doesn't seem to have anything like a package keyword

Semantically, you are right.

But, that is not the issue Ovid raised in Recap: The Future of Perl 5.

In his proposal, Ovid seeks to reduce the number of required steps and simplify the syntax in Perl 5's OO system.

As to why I said Python's OO system seems to have changed since Larry stole from it, see the Python 3 example:

class Dog:

    # Class Attribute
    species = 'mammal'

    # Initializer / Instance Attributes
    def __init__(self, name, age):
        self.name = name
        self.age = age


# Instantiate the Dog object
philo = Dog("Philo", 5)
[download]

__init__ is called with an already "blessed" ref to an already allocated container. __init__ only sets values to the objects's fields.

The 1-to-1 translation to Perl would be (using signatures to reduce "noise"):

package Dog;

our $species = 'mammal';

sub __init__ ($class, $name, $age)
{
    my $self = {};
    $self->{name} = $name;
    $self->{age} = $age;
    bless $self, $class;
}

package main;

my $philo = Dog->__init__('Philo', 5);
[download]

Even if we make __init__ more Perl-ish (still using signatures):

sub __init__ ($class, $name, $age)
{
    my $self = bless {name => $name, age => $age}, $class;
}
[download]

Ovid would still point out that Perl is requiring the programmer to perform 2 extra steps: Allocate the container and create a blessed reference to the container.

I don't know which version of Python Larry stole the OO system from, so I don't know what Larry changed. But, at least to me, Perl 5's classes look more like Smalltalk classes than Python 3 classes.