The take-away point being "If a pattern is really valuable, then it should be part of the core language". Perl, of course, has very strong functional features, as described in Higher Order Perl:
>>"If a pattern is really valuable, then it should be part of the core language"
I think this is what has caused so many misunderstandings people have about Perl over time. Perl has so many of such patterns built which solve many problems with default. In fact most people fall in love with Perl for these reasons. To understand why that is important you need to recognize such patterns in your problems, if you don't see any you will feel the solutions contained in a language as rubbish.
The entire Unix command line toolset is entirely about this thing. Unless you learn how to reduce a problem to a text processing problem, you will never learn to appreciate it.
I enjoyed this series of articles published some years ago making the case that many of the useful design patterns are built into Perl already:
http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/06/13/design1.html
http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/08/07/design2.html
http://www.perl.com/pub/2003/08/15/design3.html
The take-away point being "If a pattern is really valuable, then it should be part of the core language". Perl, of course, has very strong functional features, as described in Higher Order Perl:
http://hop.perl.plover.com/