Its OK to disagree. I am quite comfortable with C and C++ and still find it hard to hold all of Perl and its operators and naming rules in my head, to keep $s,

Its OK to disagree. I am quite comfortable with C and C++ and still find it hard to hold all of Perl and its operators and naming rules in my head, to keep $s, @, % and .(dot) and quotes etc straight. Granted it makes types more obvious than say Python. AWK is smaller. There are fewer things to remember. Perhaps a good comparison would be the size of a Perl pocket guide and a AWK pocket guide. Perl and Python are much bigger subsets of AWK.