I still chuckle, and try to remind everyone in the room that: 1) Node did not invent concurrency, Hoare did (if a single person should ever be credited on this

I still chuckle, and try to remind everyone in the room that: 1) Node did not invent concurrency, Hoare did (if a single person should ever be credited on this), others understood the concept some 20 years. 2) Node was originally based on a library by a very-controversial, still largely acclaimed Perl contributor 3) 'use strict' is indeed a Perl idea, but (to a certain extent) is the JSON format 4) The first JS repository was not npm, but JSAN, and it was started (guess) by Perl guys back in 2005 (if I remember), now long abandoned. Basically - after teaching JS and Perl for many years (10+ Perl, 4+ JS) I can confidently say that JS has always had a thing about Perl5 while Perl5 devs knew very well how to express stuff in JS from day 1, as both languages are originally very lexical, very dynamic and lazy, etc. In fact the languages Perl / JS / Python are quite similar by nature. So what? We don't have Python in the browser, even though transpiling would've been so straightforward. I fail to understand how it was not so-obvious-for-everyone that devs would spare syntax for cleaner source code. Its a very broad statement, but ES*, Python and Scala - all these have very clean syntax, and are very likely here to stay (probably Go should be in this list also). In fact - universities started using Python to teach introductory classes, rather than C. Guess why - strict rules, clear syntax, easy learning curve. The motivation for this is that DEVs get easily replaced as a resource. And that's big in terms of planning and HR. Back in the 90's, Perl5 was a definite power-horse, because no dynamic language combined different coding phenomena so well. With all due regards for all the great minds that worked on Perl6 - nowadays, there are many smart languages. And Perl needs to do more than syntax/context/name-it magic to win back confidence.