[dekhn]

I've used Python almost my entire career, but started with out the UNIX tools. I never found awk interesting, then took a peek at it recently and understood: this was the pre-perl! it had scripting-language hash tables!

[Anon84]

PERL was originally advertised as a replacement for “awk and sed”

[dekhn]

yep- and I went straight to perl after learning sed, and ignoring awk. awk looked even weirder than perl (I wasn't a big fan of the pattern matching style). In retrospect, I think awk is a massively underappreciated (for its time and context). I can't say I'd want to work with it regularly (same for perl; in the long run, I prefer variants of C style).

[kamaal]

First version of Perl was a replacement for C+awk+sed.

These are days when things like GC, hashmaps, file operations etc were hard things on Unix.