I started with Perl but moved to Ruby in the mid 00s. Ruby always felt like it gave me everything Perl did (performance aside, at the time), but with syntax that felt more intuitive.
Ruby's the most intuitive language I've ever used and my favorite to write in, but Perl and raw JavaScript are just dirty, tough, cowboy languages that are a blast to code in. You can just let go with all the best practices and write some gnarly stuff.