I hated perl in the mid-90's, and stuck with grep/awk/sed intead, because it was a little more documented-structured. Meanwhile, if you randomly mashed on your

I hated perl in the mid-90's, and stuck with grep/awk/sed intead, because it was a little more documented-structured. Meanwhile, if you randomly mashed on your keyboard, it would output a perl script. I jumped to Python as soon as I found out about it in the late 90's, because it was exactly what I was looking for in self-documenting structuring. It was great for creating parsers with state-machines. I was also the user of my scripts, and I didn't want to have to relearn what I coded a year or so earlier. Python let me pick that up, and to a lesser extent, awk. State machine programming was really self-documenting in Python.