Ahh, flexibility: Perl's greatest strength and its greatest weakness. When it comes to OO programming, there has to be a distinction between how flexible it is to do something and how flexible it is to use.

It is very easy to do OO in many different ways in Perl. Bend over backwards and you can easily tie yourself up into a pretty OO pretzel. No two Perl gurus seem to be able to agree on what is the "best" way to do it. ("Cargo Cult! Cargo Cult!") In these terms it is "flexible."

The fact the OO implementation in Perl is so "flexible" means that the resulting classes are very inflexible in terms of reusability. They don't play well with others.

In order for a language to be "OO", there have to be a clear set of rules that all of the objects can agree upon. OO needs flexibility not in terms of how one creates objects, but in terms of how one uses objects. In these terms, Perl fails miserably.

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