Unix was always about tools doing one thing. Obviously awk and sed didn’t do one thing only, but Perl broke away from that entirely. Perl tried to replace awk,

Unix was always about tools doing one thing. Obviously awk and sed didn’t do one thing only, but Perl broke away from that entirely. Perl tried to replace awk, sed, and the shell all at once. The problem with Perl is it was still tied to Unix culture to compete with Python and it’s strong library set, so it was pretty much fazed out as an awkward intermediary.