Also, speaking of hypotheticals and "would-be Perl users somewhere down the line" is meaningless, as I tried to point out somewhere in this jumble of a thread. -- mattg

I think I can safely bet that there will be more users of Perl in the near future, especially around the advent of Perl 6. I would not bet any money on the death of object-oriented programming, and in a related issue, the death of the period for object-to-method interaction¹.

I think the "hypothetical" issue of Perl users from other languages is not hypothetical at all. It happens all the time, and there's no reason to expect it to not happen later.

I've already said that I don't think Perl is right in using the arrow -- there are arguments why it is good (such as "it shows the object going to the method") -- but there is a bigger argument as to why Perl never used the dot instead. Now Perl is changing so that it can be used. Why is this happening? It certainly isn't Larry having an alcohol-induced vision of grandeur; it is Larry realizing that Perl is being different, and only because it had to be, and that by making a change here and there, we can offer something that many programmers are already familiar with. Instead of "switching gears" entirely when using Perl, they can just solve the problem differently, or solve a different problem.

I think Perl is making a good change, for reasons I've stated many times. If you don't feel my conclusion is valid, then that is your perogative. I feel I've shown enough evidence (non-hypothetical evidence from experience, even) to validate my opinion. My opinion.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;

I was not involved in programming back then, so I won't comment on why OO came to be accepted.

But I disagree on the theory that OO reflects Real Life very well.

The big thing that OO does is provide a way to organize logical models of a system which provides natural lines along which to modularize, encapsulate, and reuse behaviour. However in providing ways to organize your mental models, it also channels them. Those channels very often do not really fit the messy ways that people work in real life. People's models tend to contain parallel, conflicting classifications, are full of nasty little exceptions, and tend to adjust over time to fit a changing understanding of the world. And so it takes some experience with OO to be able to produce designs that avoid common design mistakes.

And this is an issue that I am very aware of personally. My mental models often do not map particularly well onto an OO framework. As a result, for me OO programming sometimes feels like working in a straight-jacket...