I have quite fond memories of awk, but some of these claims might be a bit on the [citation needed] side. "Easier to use" - maybe so, on the particular subset

I have quite fond memories of awk, but some of these claims might be a bit on the [citation needed] side. "Easier to use" - maybe so, on the particular subset of problems that awk was designed for. However, the ease of use upside is limited - awk constructs map pretty much 1:1 onto Python/Perl constructs that are not particularly complicated. Conversely, there is a vast set of problems that are still straightforward to solve in Python/Perl and would be rather awkward in awk. "much faster" - the comparisons I've seen (and done) usually had awk and perl5 roughly at parity. "code density ratio 10:1" - I call BS on that one. Sure, with the benefit of hindsight, it's sometimes possible to vastly simplify a script, but that has little to do with the languages involved. There is no awk solution that cannot be expressed in about 2x the lines of Python code (and that 2x is mostly because idiomatic awk puts conditions and code on one line, while Python puts them on two lines).