Getting issues in object oriented perl - perl

Question

I am new to OO perl. I am trying to write one simple program but getting the error.
Created a package Employee.pm as
package Employee;
sub new {
my $class = shift;
my $self = {};
bless $self, $class;
return $self;
}
sub get_names {
my $self = #_;
print " getting the names \n";
return $self;
}
sub set_names {
my ($self, $last_name) = #_;
$self->{last_name} = $last_name;
return $self->{$last_name};
}
1;
And created a .pl file as
use strict;
use warnings;
use Employee;
my $obj = new Employee("name" => "nitesh", "last_name" => "Goyal");
my $val = $obj->get_names();
print %$val;
my $setName = $obj->set_names("kumar");
print "$setName \n";
I am getting error as
"Can't use string ("1") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at class1.txt line 10."

Answer 1

The error
"Can't use string ("1") as a HASH ref ..
Comes from this part:
sub get_names {
my $self = #_;
When an array is put in scalar context, it returns its size. Since you call the sub with
$obj->get_names();
Only one argument is passed, which is the object, so #_ contains 1 argument, and its size is 1, therefore in the sub get_names, the variable $self is set to 1. Hence the error. What you probably should do is
my $self = shift;
But then, that will not do anything, because you never stored the names in your constructor. As mpapec said, you should do
my $self = { #_ };
in the constructor sub new.
Also, in get_names, you simply return the object, which is not very useful. You should perhaps return $self->{name} and $self->{last_name}.