A lot of people seem to have the mistaken idea that Perl 6 is going to force object-oriented programming on everybody. I'm talking mostly people outside of the Perl community, or maybe just barely outside.
Witness this slashdot post. Why do people think they're going to have to be forced to use OO in Perl 6? Where does this idea come from? How can we get the word out that MTOWTDI means take your pick of object-oriented, procedural, or even functional?
Modules like Time::Object (now called Time::Piece) show us how remarkably simple it is to make things work OO or procedural, without the user even having to know. I think most of us are fully determined that OO shouldn't be forced on anyone. A new Perl programmer should be able to start with whatever model fits his thinking and previous experience. If, later, he begins gradually soaking in the OO world, like I did, perhaps he will learn something new and add it to his toolbox.
Perl taught me OO. I didn't know it at all before Perl. In fact, my first real experience with OO was with CGI.pm. To this day, and forever I suppose, I will always use -> when writing OO pseudocode for any language (including Java, C++, Lisp, or whatever). (No, I'm not mad about the . , though. It took me a little while, but I got over it.)
