The whole refusal and insistence thing sounds moronic.

Perl is like a swiss army knife, once you master it, it's such a powerful tool that can be used everywhere.
I don't care what TIOBE says, even if it measures popularity correctly (which I seriously doubt), it doesn't measure usefulness.
Nobody should make decisions on what programming language to learn/use based on this index.

I've tried to create a Facebook account, but it gets flagged as suspicious, and later banned. Oh well.

It's a gtk frontend for clamav written in Python, I wouldn't describe it as a promising linux project

The latest generation of AI is fully capable of stopping your movie to make useless announcements in 3 different languages, and then ignore you when you actually need something.

It tells me that I'm not going to trust Tesla's autopilot anytime soon.

I don't know about Fortran, but I have seen Perl in use in all of the companies I've worked on, including my current one.
These language popularity contests are meaningless anyway, they don't measure real life usage.

They have a point system based on several things, like your education level, salary, language proficiency, etc. Depending on the score, toy can get permanent residence in 1 or 3 years. Otherwise, you can get it after 10 years, even without any points.

Not true, it's much easier to get temporary and permanent residence in Japan than in the US.
What you're thinking is citizenship, not permanent residence.

In my experience, the Nextcloud Android client is hard to use and un-intuitive.
On top of that, it doesn't even support 2-way sync on the phone.
That's what kills it for me, not the Play Store rejection (I could just use F-Droid).

More like 200 engineers. Indian engineers.

Would you say the time investment in those 7 years was worth it? I've been using it for a few months, and so far it looks like the contribution this makes to learning a language is minimal. Plus, the app is full of ads, but paying for it doesn't seem to be worth it.

"Just what I wanted" - said nobody.
How about fixing bugs and implementing things the users are really asking for?

This popularity index is completely flawed, I can't believe it's 2025 and Slashdot keeps posting about this stupid index, I wonder why. Nobody should make any decisions based on this.

Like I said, none of the deals were about releasing ALL of the hostages. The deals were about the "release of hostages" (how many?), or "release of X hostages", "the release of some hostages", etc. Also, some media in Israel are against Netanyahu, and will write things in terms to make him look bad. But even then, they can't say that the deal was about the release of ALL of the hostages. Such a deal would mean that Hamas wouldn't have any bargaining chip.