My first and only experience with Perl was like this: in 1997, just for fun, I tried to write a program in Perl to turn my Mozilla bookmarks into a website. After a week of not succeeding, in frustration I decided to try Python. In two days I had what I wanted, and programming it was a joy. That sealed my judgement that Perl (and all of its culture) was not for me, so I'm not surprised at all that others might feel the same. (To be fair, there's a single oneliner that does make life a lot easier: ... | perl -pe 's{...}{...}')

On a 2021 Camry there is an below-dash fuse labeled "DCM" which you can remove (and it does disable OnStar/telemetry, but not sat.radio[0]) — it also disables one of the speakers (used for phone calls), which there is a bypass to resolve (but it still requires removing infotainment, so at that point just unplug it there.?!).

[0] It was my understanding that, like GPS-receivers, Sirius/XM was one-way streaming, only..?

There's more than one thing that "killed perl" (I still use it almost every day.)

But I think the main thing that made it long term non competitive were a series of bad design choices all the way back to perl 4 or even 1.

Namely:

- the need for sigils

- weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

- auto flattening, ex. (@a, @b), and hence the need for manual reference management, as in (\@a, [1,2,3])

- lack of a native object system, and widespread repurposing of hashrefs as objects, with awkward field syntax $x->{foo}

- awkward function argument syntax: my ($x, $y) = @_;

These things add up, and both JS and python showed that all those can be done much more smoothly.

Another thing that counted at the time, is that PHP came out with a slightly worse language, but a super beginner-friendly approach to html templating and request lifecycle: you can just mix php and html in the same file, and the entire runtime environment is nuked at each request. The result was that php replaced perl for an entire generation of web devs in the early 2000s.

  - weird sigil rules where the 0 element of @x is $x[0] not @x[0]

I will just add a comment on an aspect of using emacs that no one else mentioned: (1) I find that I must bind caps-lock to control, and (2) as far as I can tell, no operating system does this in a way that really works besides OSX. So now I am stuck using OSX because I use emacs. When I use a GNU/Linux machine, I do it by ssh-ing in over the network from an OSX machine. I think you may find this to be something you have to deal with as well.

Sad news. Perhaps the last connection to OG physics. I was fortunate to meet Dr Yang a few times. Surreal to hear him describe working for Fermi and Oppenheimer and his reaction on hearing about the Hiroshima detonation.

Some of his work: http://home.ustc.edu.cn/~lxsphys/2021-3-18/The%20conceptual%...

And: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang%E2%80%93Mills_theory