I read a book not too long ago called Higher Order Perl, which highlights how natural functional programming in Perl is. That's right. Perl has pretty nice syntactical support for functional programming, too. The object-oriented stuff is bolted on, clumsily, in my opinion. But functional Perl is just as natural as imperative Perl. I've been writing Perl for eight years, although much less in the last few years, but this familiarity makes the transition from imperative (or what most programmers actually do, which is combine imperative and OOP styles, esp. in languages where the OOP part is bolted on, like Perl and PHP) to functional pretty simple. I had meant to use functional Perl as a stepping stone to OCaml and Haskell. But now I'm having too much fun with functional Perl...there's just no way this can end well... =D