In my mind what Perl brought to awk/sh was not flow control but rather data structures that did not make you want to kill yourself. Its standard library also d

In my mind what Perl brought to awk/sh was not flow control but rather data structures that did not make you want to kill yourself. Its standard library also delivered a lot of core sysadmin functionality back in the day and the reporting/output features fit very well with what was needed for early web CGI scripting.