[anthk]

Ken Thompson and Unix folks agree with you. The point is... Perl was a solution to the former Unix (BSD/GNU) bloatings.

When you have a look at Plan 9 (now 9fron) with rc as a shell, awk and the power of rio/acme scripting and namespaces among aux/listen... Perl feels bloated and with the same terse syntax as SH derived shells.

[eesmith]

I've been using Python almost full time since 1998 so, to misquote Dijkstra, I am mentally mutilated beyond regeneration.

[bmacho]

Is plan9 awk different?

[anthk]

Not much; what makes AWK shine it's the I/O in plan9; it's trivial to spawn sockets (literally from the command line), either plain text or encrypted. Also, rc it's much simpler than Bash.