It's not objective, but I find I have more fun in Perl than any other language. The initial jump was steep, but it helped that I already knew some shell. Now I think in references, I can guess what $_ is going to be, I slap in a big, my $val = s/<RE_HERE>/other_thing wherever I want, I could go on!

I think $_ belongs to a different era, before levelling everything to the lowest common denominator became seen as a good thing. I found the limitations of its rivals less than compelling, and besides JavaScript is arguably more complex than Perl these days.