Perl 5 would be on par with Ruby in which respect? You can't use phrases like "on par" and "inadequate" without also explaining your metric.

I find that these sorts of arguments are really about something else. On the one side some people want perfect code that fits into some idea of beauty or mathematical purity in their head and they spend inordinate amounts of time trying to get there. They get uncomfortable unless everyone programs like they do. The other side wants to get work done, and they stop when they finish their task. Pretty code might not even be on the list of things they need to accomplish before they go home at the end of the day. On yet another side, non-technical people know they need software but they don't know how to judge the quality of a programmer or they make their choice based on price. They trust their software to somehow who claims to be able to program (and certification in some language isn't going to show who can program well and who can't). Those people care about getting something they can use and that has value in the future. They want code that some other programmer can modify. Lately, I've been dealing with programmers who just want to program and don't care about any of the other stuff as long as they can continue to get people to give them money to subsidize their computer hobby.

So, who should win? Everyone has a different answer and that's why there's more than one programming language. Once you choose what you care about more, then we can talk about a particular language's fit for that. For me, Perl is completely adequate for getting work done and adding value to the world. Ruby is not adequate despite being nice language. It needs a CRAN.

Object-oriented programming isn't a language. It's a way of doing things. That Perl, Ruby, Java, whatever do it differently doesn't matter that much. Even if you fixed this niggling thing in Perl so it matched some other language, that isn't going to stop people from writing bad code. In my experience, no level of language enforcement stops bugs. Those bugs will just break out in other places. Just wait to the dumb kids start using Ruby to see a lot of bad Ruby code.

I don't mind that Perl allows people to break encapsulation. It's a lot like the guy walking into the doctor's office and saying "I bleed with I poke myself with this knife. What should I do?". Well, you don't poke yourself with knives. Another person might ask "What if someone pokes me with their knife?" In that case, stay away from people who poke other people with knives.

That some people can do bad things doesn't convince me that I should give up using Data::Dumper on an object without creating an as_dumped_string method in every class.

If we want to complain about Perl's shortcomings as an object oreinted programing language, let's talk about the lack of objects (like I do in Use Perl 6 Now in this month's TPJ ;).