It’s different because the DBI wouldn’t return an object for a nullable table record. Which is what we are specifically talking about. Sure other parts of your code might fail if you’re trying to use a scalar as an object (or such like) but that would consistently fail regardless of nullable types on the database.

So I’m not going to argue that Perl doesn’t also have its own hidden traps (a great many of them in fact) nor that it’s interpretation of OOP isn’t terrible but the scope of this discussion was about nullable types and not anything else you now want to draw into the argument.