I don't understand the attitudes either. While I enjoy writing Javascript for Node, when other Node users tell me they hate Perl, I can do nothing but give them a blank stare.

So you want an environment that is easy to program in a functional style with closures and first class functions. Has a large ecosystem, including hundreds (thousands?) of packages to do asynchronous IO. Is easily extensible and can fall back on code written in C. Finally, has a large and active community ( Madison NAPC is sold out )?

And Perl isn't even on your radar?

For the curious, I recently took some simple examples I'd seen in node.js

https://github.com/semmypurewal/node-talk-examples/

and translated them to Perl.

https://github.com/sciurus/anyevent-plack-examples

If you're interested in functional programming, I've learned a lot from the parts I've read of Higher-Order Perl.

http://hop.perl.plover.com/

It's not hip and exciting anymore and generations of poor Perl coders have everyone convinced Perl code must always look ugly.

I'm a fan of C and Python myself, but I always chuckle at all the Perl hate.

That should read: YAPC::NA