Yeah perl really fails when it comes to maintainability. If you ever write any perl and the requirements change over time (they almost certainly will in a professional setting), you have to pretty much be willing and able to throw it away and start over or accept your fate of wasting unnecessary hours. I’d never advocate for building systems in perl, because nobody wants to come back and modify some buggy piece of code when it’s so unreasonably unreadable. If you want to write some perl for your home automation system, be my guest. Please don’t use it in a situation where I grab a bug fix ticket, open the code, and find a pile of dollar signs and ampersands staring back at me.

I usually use a text editor in day to day, but when I say text editor, I mean something a little more full featured like emacs or sometimes vim. It’s quite valuable to have something that can integrate easily with a debugger and has navigation + completion features if you want to go the text editor route. I hadn’t heard of geany before, but it looks like it can do at least that much.

EDF 4 was one of my big ones. Bought it after seeing the strangely high steam reviews. Turns out it pretty much captures the feeling of that fun game that you played on your friend’s PS2 after school on Friday. Something about chucking increasingly large explosives at piles of giant ants really just does it for me.

Devil May Cry is probably the closest comparison

I think this is the big one we’ve been waiting for. Only tiny gripe is that the QTEs freeze framing is a little silly in the year 2023. I feel like Asura’s Wrath solved QTEs a decade ago.