Your use of syntax leaves me with the impression that before Perl you only knew Haskell, or some other, lazy / currying functional language.

The major difference between Perl and these others is that Perl is eager, so any unadorned mention of a function will simply call it. Unless you use built-in functions or fancy syntax tricks, all function parameters are passed in parentheses.

Creating/returning new functions is quite possible in Perl, but the usual approach is more eager in the sense of passing around values instead of passing around functions that, at some time in the future will be called to produce the final output of the program.