Okay, the title was meant to be inflammatory. Don't read too much into it.

Perl leaves much to be desired as a functional programming language. Not having currying, pattern matching, proper tail recursion, and real garbage collection are limiting, painful even.

What frustrates me most about Perl (from a FP perspective, at least) is the distinction between builtins and user functions. If anyone can tell me how to get around that without writing sub {$_[0] + $_[1]} everywhere, I'd be most grateful.

Update: I realize that this complaint is a bit vague. What I really want to do is take coderefs to builtins and operators and pass them to higher-order functions. To the best of my knowledge, this is not an easy thing to do.