If you write bad functional code, that does not imply the of failure functional programming.

What were you thinking, indeed?

use List::Util qw(reduce);

my $highest = reduce { $a > $b ? $a : $b } @list;
[download]

Of course, in practice, you'd use the specialized max() function from the module — but the above is how you'd write this algorithm in any functional language.

The fact that you wrote the sort solution in functional style is a red herring — you can just as well write a sort solution in imperative style.