Yeah, while everyone still discussing on how to do FP in mainstream languages, Higher-Order Perl was published in 2005, placing many of such ideas how we were already doing that stuff in Perl into paper.

Perl allows to come at peace with UNIX being done in C, by exposing similar programing language capabilities, mixed with Lisp like wizardy, without having to deal with C security faults unless required for performance reasons, that could not be improved in any other way.