I'm not terribly familiar with awk, but it seems very useful. My understanding is that it lacks a lot of the features that people expect from a modern, general-

I'm not terribly familiar with awk, but it seems very useful. My understanding is that it lacks a lot of the features that people expect from a modern, general-purpose programming language (not that it can't be or hasn't been done--but you're probably not going to be writing a web server in awk for example), but also that awk has been improved significantly since the mid 80s when Larry Wall decided to create perl as basically "a better awk." But awk is definitely very good in its niche, which is processing text data.