I'd say the reason that a lot of people can use Perl without learning OO is a good thing. It means they can get things done without having to bother learning too much, a few basic commands and you have a useful program which you can understand.

Ever seen how much hand-waving most Java books end up doing when trying to explain what the 'public static void main' bit means in their Hello World programs? When people want to get things done (Which is the real purpose of a language) Perl doesn't stand in their way unless asked to.

Perl is a nice 'compromise' language which shapes itself around you rather than the other way around.

If people begin to want to write large programs they will (hopefully) read up in a few of the right places and realise the proper way to do this. Now is when they'll learn OO, and in my mind now is when they need to learn OO. Personally I don't consider Perl to be the ideal language to learn classical OO from, it uses too many of it's own mannerisms and when looking at OO Perl it's difficult to tell the wood from the trees.

All things considered though I don't think Java or C++ s the ideal language to learn OO either. Both are good languages which I do use (I was hired as a C++ coder here, and am sometimes called upon to give my own odd perspectives helping the main team which are Java people), but Java lacks too many things which I think OO programmers should know (Multiple inheritance, Operator Overloading, Pre and Post conditions.. etc.), and C++ both lacks them and adds in some tricksie memory handling. If learning OO is the goal I'd point people towards Eiffel. I'd never really suggest using it in production, though.

In reply to Re: Make Perl an OO language by Molt
in thread Make Perl an OO language by gildir

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