Hmm, I used awk in 1987, and it was just fine... it really hasn't changed all that much since. "nawk" ("new awk") vs. "awk" was an issue, with the former being

Hmm, I used awk in 1987, and it was just fine... it really hasn't changed all that much since. "nawk" ("new awk") vs. "awk" was an issue, with the former being preferable (I don't recall why offhand, other than it seemed a lot less buggy), but even that dated from the mid-'80s. Perl certainly offered new functionality, but it felt palpably kludgier than awk. The idea that it was some sort of giant advance over awk was rather overplayed, especially within awk's domain, where awk's cleaner language design and more focused features were real advantages over perl. [When perl first showed up, I remember thinking how churlish its "a2p" script was... who'd want to switch to perl, given a working awk program?!]