I'm not sure one could call it a dialect: I've found myself using List::Util more and more lately. It's a pity it wasn't in core before 5.8. Not that it does anything I couldn't do anyway; but it's convenient not to spell out its idioms constantly.

But I would rather call it more elaborate Perl, as opposed to a dialect, much the way a writer hones his ability to use his language more skillfully by expanding his vocabulary and his mastery of rhetorical devices. My about five years of Perl so far have been a constant transition towards a more and more functional programming style.

Perl has grown me out of thinking on the low, the machine dependent level, the implementation specific plane, and expanded my mind into a far more abstract approach. I have gained another, very different perspective into programming. In a paradoxical way, Perl's "dirty" approach to solving problems the practical way has made me much more of a computer scientist than I was before.

Given that spirit, I'm not sure I could treat myself to something like OO C++ or even Java with their stiff and rigid typing system anymore. It seems like a chore dictated by the close proximity of a language to the hardware and the consequent lack of metainformation about the program and its data at runtime. I've got myself several books on Java and tried to get into it so far; after all, it's a very marketable skill (even if I can end up doing more of my job in Perl, eventually *grin*), but haven't had the stamina to shovel through any of them. It's just no fun.

On the other hand, I am wildly curious about Lisp, Smalltalk and Prolog nowadays.

Err.. I think I veered off topic somewhat. Anyway. You get an idea of how I look at code nowadays. The way I write my Perl is a direct consequence.

Makeshifts last the longest.