A slight taste of Perl

Over the last weeks I've been learning some Perl. Yes, I know it sounds like odd, what the hell is doing someone quite obsessed with language evolution learning a dusty 90's language?
Well, let's explain. First, a new project sprang up in my employer involving Perl and relocating for some months to the very beautiful city of Toulouse. Spending some months in Toulouse seemed appealing enough to me to make Perl look as cute as ES6 or even more :-) so I just eagerly jumped into the project.
Second, Perl is way much better than I would have expected. I guess I'll be blogging about it in the nearby future, so I'll just say here that you can do perfectly modern programming with Perl 5. This does not change the fact that the language is riddle with very idiomatic "features" that I frankly consider SHIT (the default variable/parameter thing above all), but well, it's just a matter of avoiding those things (and praying for not having to work with code written by others that consider those features cool and useful).

The thing is that while learning Perl I've come up with some very familiar features that until that moment I used to identify as JavaScript specific. Probably the most obvious are shift, unshift and splice for arrays. While the functionality is common to almost any language/library, the choice of names is not (I guess Append, RemoveFirst... are quite more natural).

A fast search brings up a related entry in the excellent 2ality blog. Well, there are a few more influences not mentioned there that I can think of:

• Perl's undef is mainly the same as JavaScript's undefined
• While (contrary to JavaScript) Perl lacks a Boolean type, the coercion rules applied to normal values in if conditions and son on are pretty similar. 0, "", and undef are considered false. Notice though, that "0" and an empty array/list will be considered false in Perl, but true in JavaScript.
• I would not call this an influence, but an inherited disease... the most basic function to obtain the current datelocaltime, considers months from 0 to 11, rather than 1 to 12... one of the most common JavaScript gotchas.
• Update, 2013/12/27 Removing a key from a dictionary/hash is pretty similar (and not particularly intuitive, I would prefer a .remove method), use the delete operator in JavaScript:
  delete myObj.key;
  or the delete function in perl:
  delete(myHashRef->{key});

There has also been some more recent influences. JavaScript 1.7 first (implemented by Firefox since quite a few years ago) and ES6 now, implement destructuring assignment, a beauty that Python also drew from Perl. Moose, a modern object system for Perl 5 sprung up a JavaScript equivalent, Joose.