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Anecdote which amuses me: I find JavaScript tolerable thanks to Joose and other ideas borrowed from Perl.

I don't think you read what you're responding to. How can they all have an "unparalleled extension ecosystem"?

Not sure if you'd have any thoughts on this matter...

The JavaScript community as a whole (seen especially in the direction of node.js + NPM) is moving away from global namespaces and toward the "module pattern" and dependency injection (note: I had no idea what those terms really meant 6 months ago).

Presently, Joose3 goes against that grain. For example, if in a node.js script you:

   require('joose')
   if (Joose) { console.log(true) } // prints true!

Basically, the global namespace gets auto-populated with "Joose" and a chain of namespaces below that. This is very Perl/Moose-like, of course.

When you define classes, roles, etc. you get similar behavior:

   Joose.Class('MyClass', {...})
   if (MyClass) { console.log('effectively stubbed in a global namespace!') }
   // does log that text to console, as Joose.Class() behaves that way

And in fact, Joose3 encourages you to embrace that behavior (with `use:` builders and lots of discrete files) to arrive at a network of cross-referenced namespaces which altogether form a library, and API usually.

To go with the flow, and especially to take advantage of emerging module specs like AMD (commonjs thing), a redesigned Joose (i.e. Joose4) needs to eschew global namespaces entirely:

   var myJuice = require('joose')
   ...
   // There should be no tie to a "Joose" namespace as such

But how to do that, and elegantly?

Any wisdom from the Perl community in that regard? Maybe someone else has been trying to port Perl stuff to JavaScript/node.js and has found the perfect formalism for translating from global namespaces -> module pattern + dependency injection? Know any Moose wizards that would be willing to help explore this matter?

Python is a beautiful language too!

Perl has its own strengths. In order to win as scripting language on the UNIX environment a language will have to get some things right very well. Two of them namely 'Processes' and 'Files(text)'. UNIX is really about these two things heavily. That is why you will see UNIX by a vanilla installation has shipped with tools like sed, grep, awk, cut, tr, cat and other text processing tools for decades. Because a file can act as a pretty good representation for data, storage and problem representation use cases. Another area that the language will have to get right is 'DBMs'.

Speaking of Perl's merits as scripting languages alone, Perl offers a native way of interacting with all these things that I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Things like ``, system(), open(), close() , die(), chomp, while), split(), grep, !~ , ~= and regular expressions make text processing a breeze. In addition, Higher order parsing is very easy in Perl too, Regular expressions are first class objects. For more information on this you can read Mark Jason Dominus's Higher order Perl. Which is a free book.

Now coming to Perl's merits as general purpose scripting language. You have your usual language tool kit with data structures(usual numbers, strings), arrays, hashes. Flow control, functions, OO, functional programming features. But the plus and the biggest winner is the extension system. There is a huge repository of readily solved problems on the CPAN. You have language extension modules like Moose, Try::Tiny, etc etc.

In terms of the web development ecosystem, Perl has catalyst, DBIx::Class, Plack etc etc. You also have a good asynchronous programming framework.

In terms of documentation. Check out the amazing perldoc.perl.org. There is also Learning Perl, Programming Perl and recently Chromatic's beautiful book 'Modern Perl book'.

In terms of development practice and stability. Perl has a track record and battle tested for decades now, Its used to develop mission critical applications. For best practices you can read Damian Conway's Best practices book.

Also, Checkout enlightened Perl and Task::Kensho for the best of the breed modules.

As a plus and cherry on the cake, there is a new sister programming language called Perl 6 in the making. With great concepts, cleaner defaults and more pragmatic in the real world.

Perl 6 is usable today with Rakudo. Give it a whirl.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should...