The purist who says this is quite correct -- it is possible to write workable Perl programs that use no object oriented features at all.

The pedant who says this is mostly correct -- Perl was not originally designed as an object oriented language.

The pooh-pooher who says this is uninformed -- Perl's object oriented features are powerful, elegant, simple, and incredibly Perlish.

When it comes down to brass tacks, not everything is an object in Perl. There are native types (scalars, arrays, and strings), functions can exist independent of classes, and very little from any programming discipline is rigidly enforced (or enforced at all). If you're into that sort of thing, Smalltalk is a real object oriented language and most other languages aren't.

(Those of us who actually do real work with OOPerl now and then will continue doing real work, no matter what they say.)