[jrochkind1]

My first job getting paid to program was in awk. Processing log files.

In the middle of that job, my supervsior, you know what, we're doing increasingly complicated things with awk and it's getting increasingly hacky... I've heard that Perl is like awk but better, do you want to learn Perl and switch to that?

And so we did. My thought then was there was little that was easier in awk than Perl, you could use Perl very much like awk if you wanted, you can even use the right command-line args to have Perl have an "implied loop" like awk... but then you can do a lot more with Perl too.

I don't use Perl anymore. Or awk.

[linuxlizard]

I think I remember reading somewhere Larry Wall was inspired to create Perl in order to combine awk+sed functionality. He was sick of awk+sed being almost powerful enough to do what he needed. (I can't find a reference to this though.)