Thanks for recommending this book. Mostly I write TypeScript day-to-day, so naturally I typically reach for nodejs when I want to "upgrade" a script from bash to a more expressive language in a cross-platform way. I've been frustrated with that tooling, however, for a whole bunch of reasons, at lot of it to do with how clunky nodejs actually is in shell pipelines. I've thought about reaching for python, but it has some similar issues to nodejs: you need a particular environment, and some things which ought to be natural in a shell environment just...aren't...in python. I think someone here suggested Lua, and I just...don't care for Lua (although I haven't tried it in a scripting-like context).

Anyhow, I've been reading this for a half-hour or so and I'm struck by how incredibly similar common Perl idioms feel to JavaScript as it is commonly used today. I think part of this familiarity has to do partly with type coercion, partly with destructing assignments, partly with function "context"(as in Perl) as it is commonly deployed in the nodejs ecosystem, partly because of the way default arguments and function passing relates to the default scalar variable in Perl.

I've been playing around with OCaml and Rust a bunch recently, but haven't had any good reason to reach for them "in real life." The fact that Perl is "everywhere" (much the way JavaScript is "everywhere" as a side effect of browsers being ubiquitous), means that I'm likely to start reaching for Perl instead of nodejs when I need to move beyond Bash. It really does seem to be the right tool for the job.

So, a hearty "thank you" for the recommendation.