I have yet to come across another language with a following quite so pervasive as Perl's, so this fear of Perl falling out of favour doesn't hold water. -- mattg

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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¹ Object-oriented programming caught on because it represented a whole new paradigm of doing things in programs. Code began to be life-like. You had objects (people) with associated methods (actions). You had hierarchies (managers and underlings) and inheritance (sub-projects). So long as programmers remember Real Life, this method of programming will remain popular. It changed code from lifeless subroutines to dynamic actions. Programming is dynamic. On a related note, the dot syntax will probably linger due to its following... not unlike Perl.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
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