How is that a guaranteed win? Most things in programming have not died. We simply get more tools. People still use procedeural and functional programming. About the only thing that's died is line numbers.
Some languages have fallen out of favor, but that's because they didn't adapt to changing demands (which Perl is doing here). COBOL is still hainging on only for legacy maintence. Fortran doesn't provide what the masses need.
Perl is changing to meet changing needs and to attract more programmers. And it will change again in the future. Dot notation could go away. Maybe there will be some other notation that the programming world sees as better. Right now it's the dot (unfortunately for you).
But I'd doubt that OO will go away. It might change significantly, but the general principle of performing actions on objects will still be there. And I'd hazard a guess that it's still using the dot. It's become standard for much more than programming.. it's something that non programmers can still understand. Just imagine..
www->perlmonks->com
or worse.. www<-permonks<-com
I mean the second makes perfect sense, right?
Why do we use a dot for FQDN and IP address seperation? because it's a clear separator, visually non-obtrusive and easy to type (we type periods all the time in sentances).
The real issue here is that you don't like it. Whether OO is here in 20 years or there's not even a period on our keyboard anymore isn't the issue. The issue is that Perl is changing to keep with the times. Some of those changes arn't going to sit well with people. Fortunately for you, you'll supposidly be able to redefine these operators and it won't even be an issue. Hell, you can still use complete perl5 syntax if you want to. Maybe even write it in Python if the spirit moves you.
This change is far from the end of the world and it's something you can configure away if your heart so desires.
But for the future, there will be a lot less people that look (so) crosseyed when they first glimpse Perl.
Rich | 