I went back and read the rest of the stuff on his site, and you're right. He's either talking about Perl without saying so, or is talking in general. The funny thing is that the page you cited could have come right out of a J2EE discussion forum.

I disagree though, that the underlying issue is that using a session object equates to using global state, unless there's some peculiarity with the one he's using. Generally, session objects are kept in a hash keyed by session id, and themselves hold hashes (or the equivalent) for stuffing in session-specific data. Adding data to one session doesn't ipso facto make it available to others. The problem, or one of them, is that session object can become a dumping ground for cruft that isn't garbage collected until the session expires. One can look at that as clogging up the session's namespace, I suppose.