Matthew's Journal

Just want to strongly second mobbsy's comment about OOP. It's an ugly, hacked-on afterthought of an extension which fits uneasily with Perl's strong procedural foundations and (almost) everyone else's ideas of how to do objects. It's only there because of the "OOP is shiny and The Way Forward" movement, and too many people wound up drinking the Kool-Aid and writing hideously impenetrable and unusable Perl modules which would have been vastly simpler and cleaner if they hadn't tried to make it object orientated.

People often make the mistake, when moving from Perl to Python, of trying to use regular expressions for all string handling. It's a mistake because regular expressions are an integral part of the Perl language, whereas in Python they're an extension, where they should only be used when they're the right tool. Going the other way, precisely the same is true about object orientation.