I have two theories
1. Other languages are falling faster than Perl making Perl rise

2. Perl is what smart people use instead of bash. So for all sysadmin tasks or ad hoc system scripts or gluing you'd be crazy to use bash when you can use Perl.

I'm perpetually mystified how TIOBE is considered to be in any way reputable.

It's just searching for "$LANGUAGE programming" in various engines and applying magic fudge factors.

It's not an indicator of jobs, or activity, or much of anything else really. This is especially obvious with things like Visual Basic showing up weirdly close to the top, and having large spikes, as if there were times when VB suddenly got a huge influx in demand.

VB never even transitioned to 64 bits, it's that old. VB.NET i suppose exists but seems mostly pointless since it all compiles down to CIL anyway. Might as well use C#.

If you don't have a garage, or
If you need to drive on the highway to get groceries, or
If you live alone, nevermind, this is not for you.

But if you have multiple people in the house, and get the car out of the garage to drive a mile or three for groceries, you are throwing money away if you don't own a cheap, used EV.

You can get one for $5k, but it's probably wiser to pay more like $9 to $12k for one. You can charge it from a 120v outlet -- it draws the same current as a $30 Walmart space heater. You will be paying less than 1/4 of what you pay per mile for a gas sedan, or 1/8th what you pay per mile for a truck. You can get that down even more if you charge at the right time, at least in some places. You'll never pay for oil changes or brake jobs, and you're ICE car/truck will last longer because you won't be doing short trips in it.

You are almost certainly going to like the EV. But if you don't you'll be able to say "yep, I have one, and here's why they suck." And even while you hate it, it's going to save you a lot of money.

There are no hidden costs here. Cheap used EVs get about 4 miles per KWH in neighborhood driving. They draw about 1.5kw into them on a 120v plug. So overnight, they're going to get a good 50+ miles, which is a lot more than a grocery store trip, or a couple of trips to school to pick up or drop off your kid. You don't need any special wiring, so long as your garage has remotely decent, purely residential electrical. Old cheap EVs all come with a 120v charger, so there's really nothing to buy. (If the previous owner LOST it, it's gonna cost you about $120 to buy a replacement.) Generally speaking, it's buy the car, get it some plates and liability insurance, and you're done.

Go cheap. In the low end, old EVs lose value very slowly. So there's very little risk here.

does 2x shift the frequency?

RSS is how I saw this article, too. After Google killed their own RSS reader I poked around at a few options and settled on NewsBlur back in 2016. It has a free version, but after giving that a spin I elected to go for the paid version. $36/yr has been a pretty good investment IMO, save myself a lot of time checking between multiple sites manually. I could probably survive with the free account as I don't have that many RSS feeds but, eh, at this point I'm happy to keep paying until I need to really pinch my pennies.

The layout has had minimal nips/tucks in ~10 years, I have feeds arranged in a way I rather like, I use the web version so I can easily look at from different desktops. The small dev team (I think it's more than one person now, but not by much if so) and lack of sell-out means it's avoided enshittification, tho that has meant a few periods of long outages. (Many years ago their servers went ass-over-teakettle while the dev was on vacation and couldn't respond for like two days, ope; but that's a severe outlier, these days I'll see a "Newsblur is down" notice at the bottom on rare occasion without ever really causing me trouble.)

I also use the FeedBro extension in FireFox for, ahem, personal interests. Very nice for image-based feeds, which I don't know if NewsBlur does as well, but I'm not looking to mix my peas and porridge anyway... Vivaldi, my main browser, has a built in RSS thing but I haven't tried it cause I got NewsBlur. I'm overall happy with the browser, tho, so I assume it's at least decent.

Before I started using Google's RSS Reader, I had a custom HTML page with iframes and some javascript so it was easy for me to just press "down" in a drop-down box to visit a site to check for updates/news. The thought of going back to something like that is not a pleasant one, and I sure as hell am not going to try to follow all these sites through some social media funnel, oof. In fact, this story reminded me that there are still things I regularly, manually check which I could probably handle via RSS/NewsBlur as well...

I understand your knee jerk intuition about crypto currency. But very earnestly I suggest learning a bit about monetary policy. It's indispensable. And after that you may want to read about bretton woods and how banks in different countries actually can trade money to each other. The US treasury and its impact on monetary policy enables this. It's not just a methodology in the sense that bitcoin is a method for moving money. Monetary policy is how countries can perform the miracle of Keynesian economics to regenerate Growth in a downturn. That cannot ever be done ever without fiat currency and a central bank. Period. This was. Why for example Germany plunged in to pre-hitler ruin after world war 1. There was no way to climb out of turned down economy when you had no gold reserves (France took them). Germany only managed to recover when they pegged their mark to a kilo of wheat-- not a long term solution but a desperate move that mostly worked. But the economic malaise didn't end till Hitler started spending money into the economy. That was made possible by moving off the gold standard prior to Hitler.

Without monetary policy you are left with the austerity of Austrian economics which pretty much inverts the rational of monetary policy and loses all it's advantages.

If crypto ever rises to rival the dollar you can kiss the USA goodbye because it will mean the end of monetary policy and central banking. If you say good riddance, I think you may not understand how the world works

What do you mean by that? They both work out to the same thing just with a different syntax.

TIOBE basically searches a bunch of search engines and other things for "$LANGUAGE programming", applies some magical fudge factor and calls that a result.

It's absolute nonsense. It's highly manipulable if you can convince people to use the " programming" wording. It's going to be highly affected by the appearance and disappearance of documentation websites. It will of course still pick up ancient archives of stuff that nobody is actually using today.

I have an extreme skepticism of that VB is anywhere near the top 10. The original VB died long, long ago. VB.NET wasn't backwards compatible in the slightest and I don't think it ever had much adoption, because what's even the point? You might as well use C# instead. In fact long ago I had a VB project I considered transitioning to VB.NET and quickly decided it wasn't worth it, and went with C#. That was somewhere in the early 2000s, and I don't think it's gotten any more appealing since.

TIOBE is still nonsense of the highest order, not sure why anyone bothers using it.

It's some search engine counts based voodoo. Maybe not the most terrible metric possible, but I have no idea why it's the one always being discussed when there's better things one could measure at this point. Like say, GitHub.

If we want to know what's currently most popular, what we should want is measuring the actual usage. That might be projects, or commits, depending.

I never understood Mozilla's foray into AI.

There's just nothing about Mozilla that suggests to me they are experts on the subject matter and have much to contribute in the area. I could be wrong, but Mozilla is so tightly associated to the web that it just was a hard sell to me that their AI efforts were going to go anywhere from the start.

Everyone looks out their window and thinks that's "most of the planet."

Most of the planet thinks EVs are amazing, because they're cheap, require almost no maintenance, charge with solar panels, and take them the very short distances they currently travel more comfortably than the bus, motorbike, auto-rickshaw, or their feet. Most of the world doesn't drive right now. EVs are way more practical for them than gas cars.

And China is going to eat that whole market, because we're not in a position to compete at all. The closest the West has to competing with China is some EU automakers -- France and eastern Europe.

They have a lot to protect: GM, Ford, Exxon, Shell, and a bunch of military suppliers, and the money those folks contribute, so protecting them protects politicians jobs.

But I'd buy one or more of the cars you're talking about, too.

Yep. You can last some time doing that. You know best whether you want to store enough for 100 miles or 100,000.

But with solar panels, you can drive around for a lifetime. And they don't burn your house down or take up space in your bunker.

I have written a few comments here with multiple paragraphs, and included numbers, explained how things actually work, etc.

You summed it up in 3 (4? one's hypenated) words.

Nicely done.