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STANSTED Airport is one of the busiest airports in the country and as a holiday-goer myself, I’ve used it many times.

STANSTED Airport is one of the busiest airports in the country and as a holiday-goer myself, I’ve used it many times.

TIOBE attempts to calculate programming language popularity using the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And the eight most popular languages in September's rankings haven't changed since last month: 1. Python 2. C++ 3. C 4. Java 5. C# 6. JavaScript 7. Visual Basic 8. Go But by TIOBE's ranking, Perl is still the #10 most-popular programming in September (dropping from #9 in August). "One year ago Perl was at position 27 and now it suddenly pops up at position 10 again," marvels TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen. The technical reason why Perl is rated this high is because of its huge number of books on Amazon. It has 4 times more books listed than for instance PHP, or 7 times more books than Rust. The underlying "real" reason for Perl's increase of popularity is unknown to me. The only possibility I can think of is that Perl 5 is now gradually considered to become the real Perl... Perl 6/Raku is at position 129 of the TIOBE index, thus playing no role at all in the programming world. Perl 5 on the other hand is releasing more often recently, thus gaining attention. An article at the i-Programmer blog thinks Perl's resurgence could be from its text processing capabilities: Even in this era of AI, everything is still governed by text formats; text is still the King. XML, JSON calling APIs, YAML, Markdown, Log files..That means that there's still need to process it, transform it, clean it, extract from it. Perl with its first-class-citizen regular expressions, the wealth of text manipulation libraries up on CPAN and its full Unicode support of all the latest standards, was and is still the best. Simply there's no other that can match Perl's text processing capabilities. They also cite Perl's backing by the open source community, and its "getting a 'proper' OOP model in the last couple of years... People just don't know what Perl is capable of and instead prefer to be victims of FOMO ephemeral trends, chasing behind the new and shiny." Perl creator Larry Wall answered questions from Slashdot's readers in 2016. So I'd be curious from Slashdot's readers about Perl today. (Share your experiences in the comments if you're still using Perl -- or Raku...) Perl's drop to #9 means Delphi/Object Pascal rises up one rank, growing from 1.82% in August to 2.26% in September to claim September's #9 spot. "At number 11 and 1.86%, SQL is quite close to entering the top 10 again," notes TechRepublic. (SQL fell to #12 in June, which the site speculated was due to "the increased use of NoSQL databases for AI applications.") But TechRepublic adds that the #1 most popular programming language (according to TIOBE) is still Python: Perl sits at 2.03% in TIOBE's proprietary ranking system in September, up from 0.64% in January. Last year, Perl held the 27th position... Python's unstoppable rise dipped slightly from 26.14% in August to 25.98% in September. Python is still well ahead of every other language on the index.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trump took to Truth Social on Saturday morning to rebuke NATO allies for buying oil from Russia, despite their opposition to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

After its six-year journey to Saturn's moon Titan, Dragonfly's rotorcraft lander "will fly like a large drone," explains its web page, spending three years sampling multiple landing sites to characterize Titan's habitability and look for "precursors of the origin of life." "However, the project has undergone multiple replans impacting cost and schedule, resulting in a life-cycle cost increase of nearly $1 billion and over 2 years of delays," according to an announcement from NASA's Inspector General. From the Inspector General's report: The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing [Johns Hopkins University] Applied Physics Laboratory to conduct four replans between June 2019 and July 2023 early in Dragonfly's development. Justifications for these replans included the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, changes to accommodate a heavy-lift launch vehicle, projected funding challenges, and inflation." But its higher-than-expected life-cycle cost over $3 billion "will continue to absorb an increasing proportion of the Planetary Science Division's total budget," meaning Dragonfly's increased cost (and "additional budget constraints") have "contributed to a gap of at least 12 years in New Frontiers [planetary science] mission launches, and will jeopardize future priorities outlined in the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's (National Academies) decadal surveys." Yet a NASA press release notes the mission "has cleared several key design, development and testing milestones and remains on track toward launch in July 2028." Its software-defined radio has been completed, and the part of the spectrometer which analyzes Titan's chemical components for "potentially biologically relevant" compounds (as well as structural and thermal testing of the lander's insulation). "The mission is scheduled to launch in July 2028 on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch vehicle from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for spotting this news on the space/science blog "Behind the Black".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harry Styles put on a very cosy display with rumoured girlfriend Zoë Kravitz on Friday as the pair enjoyed a romantic stroll through the streets of Rome, Italy. 

In training notes for inspectors, the education standards body states: 'Children and young people with autism are at increased risk of being susceptible to extremism.

The 15-year-old's nomination for best supporting actor is just one of 13 that the show, about a teenager accused of murder, has received.

Nobody could have anticipated the horror that unfolded in Leicester Square on a sunny summer morning little more than a year ago.

Locals congregated outside a property on Southfield Lane in Little Horton, Bradford at 10.11pm on Saturday night hearing an explosion as emergency services descended on the scene.

When I first heard of Charlie Kirk's assassination, my mind went back to Amsterdam, 2004.

President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania are 'thrilled' that the Princess of Wales will be 'front and centre' during their two-day State visit.

The former Prime Minister was spotted watching a sunrise across the Black Sea in Odesa alongside excited Ukrainians taking selfies.

The son of the late Jade Goody and TV star Jeff Brazier announced he was set to become a father with an ex-girlfriend last week, and has now revealed they are back together in an update.

Doctors are urging the public to watch out for the lesser-known signs of the condition - from blurred vision and recurrent thrush to tingling hands and feet or even crusty skin patches in the armpits.

Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper has vowed that Britain will continue supporting Ukraine amid its ongoing war with Russia.

Poison has long dripped from the corpse of Jeffrey Epstein, polluting the reputation of anyone who'd been drawn into his orbit.

Nicolette Booth was always hopeful that the value of her flat in Earlsfield, south London, would rise in time - after all, property in the capital had been a safe bet for many years.

ANDREW GRIFFITH: Labour 's disastrous (un)Employment Bill is back in Parliament next week. Keir Starmer had a chance to bin the Bill when Angela Rayner resigned.

The 'Unite The Kingdom' march saw an estimated 150,000 people march through central London today, with police reporting that they faced 'unacceptable violence' from the crowd.