Preference and experience. My time with Perl was wrestling with code that people wrote to show how good they were at Perl, and where maintainability was a seco

Preference and experience. My time with Perl was wrestling with code that people wrote to show how good they were at Perl, and where maintainability was a secondary concern. This is a bit harder to do in Awk (but not impossible). I moved from Perl to Python in the 1.5 days in part because of this. I believe this occurs with Java now too. Neither Perl nor Java are bad languages, they are both powerful and performant. However there are some architecture astronauts who seem to enjoy making life harder for the rest of us.