1. Perl is at least in part so liked by starting programmers because of its short and easy syntax and shallow learning curve. OO Perl IMO should be taught after basic perl and the students have found the problems that OO Perl solves. My path to OO was slow and started by using CPAN modules.

2. There are better approaches to teaching OO programming than using Perl IMHO (XP's fall). Phyton or Java forced me to learn better OOP, which I can then apply to any language.

3. OO Perl forces you to learn more about the Perl internals IMO, and this can be ugly. It's a small step from learning about packages to learning about the dangers in pass by reference, trying to implement exceptions, AUTOLOAD traps, eval traps, magic "goto &func" etc. It was so much easier when your code was just a bunch of print statements :)

Tiago