Inheritance in Perl is indeed clunkier to set up than in other languages. Is it worth it? That depends on what you're doing.

On to the particulars of your example:

In Noun::new(), you need to either defer blessing or re-bless after you've invoked SUPER::new(). Unless you do, Noun::new will return instances of Word. Not correct: see the post below.

A cleaner way is to separate "initialization" from creation. 

package Word;

sub new {
    my $pkg = shift;
    my $self = bless {}, $pkg;
    $self->initialize(@_);
    $self;
}

sub initialize {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->{stem} = shift;
    $self->{english} = shift;
}

package Noun;

use base qw(Word);

sub new {
    my $pkg = shift;
    bless {}, $pkg;
    $self->initialize(@_);
    $self;
}

sub initialize {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->SUPER::initialize(shift, shift);
    $self->{gender} = shift;
    $self->{nom_sg} = shift;
    $self->{gen_sg} = shift;
}

[download]
This cleans things up, at the expense, arguably, of more "clunk". Then we have to add a bit more clunk to deal with print $w->{english}; which commits the great OO sin of assuming private details of an object. The official way out of this is to add an "accessor" method to your base class. 
sub english {
    my $self = shift;
    return $self->{english};
}

[download]

In reply to Re: inheritance: constructors by dws
in thread inheritance: constructors by Basilides

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.