use strict;

my @fullnames = (
 "Smith, David",
 "Lamb, Mary",
 "Depp, Johnny",
 "Child, Julia",
);

my %x = map { /(.*), (.)/ ? ( $_ => $2.$1 ) : () } @fullnames;

print "$_ => $x{$_}\n" for keys %x;
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Oh, I'm sorry — you said if Perl wasn't my [0]th language.
;-)