If you think that's a good idea, you don't understand why tools like awk/perl/sed/etc exist and are popular. They are, by design, optimized toward specific kin

If you think that's a good idea, you don't understand why tools like awk/perl/sed/etc exist and are popular. They are, by design, optimized toward specific kinds of use cases. In fact, their dynamically typed nature is a perfect example of that since it's much easier to quickly manipulate strings in a language that isn't so strict, as they'll do more heavy lifting for you via automatic coercion while limiting extra syntax/boilerplate (which, granted, is less of a problem with modern type inference). That makes it a lot easier to toss together quick one-liners and glue code, which is where these tools shine in the first place. Hell, even something like python or ruby is just a little too structured for my taste when doing something quick and dirty, which is why I love perl as it can be unstructured if that's all I need, or I can create a more structured program if that's what the problem requires.