Perl always will be my favorite language. Its absolutely a joy to write. What's interesting to me is that all the things that people like about JavaScript, Perl had first, and I think better (closures, first class functions).<p>The criticisms that people had about Perl, such as that it langrage like line noise was unfortunate. Being able to tell whether something was a scalar, array, or hash by the character that preceded it was helpful.<p>Being able to slap a set of braces around code to create a closure was also much better than needing to do the same in a function like JavaScript.<p>Perl formed some much new ground. CPAN was the predecessor of npm, etc.<p>I'm just glad to be able to write functional code again through JavaScript, just like when I wrote Perl. I don't miss writing Java (or any static typed object oriented language) at all, and hope I never will again. I just hope that ES6 doesn't turn JavaScript engineers into object oriented programmers.