> Although you don't have to use them, at all. Also if you insist on implementing your own object oriented design the slow hard way by hand using references ins

> Although you don't have to use them, at all. Also if you insist on implementing your own object oriented design the slow hard way by hand using references instead of "use Moose;" like a normal person, its hard and slow just the way you asked for it, instead of being made impossible. If you are a perl programmer, you have to know and use references(pass hash, pass array with other params, nested data structures...). "you don't have to use them" is true in the sense that you don't have to use anything - you don't have to use lists, hashes, OOP, what have you. The same goes for OOP. Moose is an option for new code, not for code which has been written with blessed references. I don't have anything against references; I do have something against using references and de-references for nested data structures and passing data structures to functions. Yes, I do understand references, but I will take the way Python and Ruby make do without references over Perl's references any day.