@ColinTheMathmo

Personally it's all down to preference. I've been using grep/sed/awk for so many years that even writing "perl -le '_script stuff here_" feels like overkill.

I regularly still write in Perl, bash and nowadays Powershell (mainly for interoperability with Windows and M365 stuff), but sometimes being able to let my brain freewheel and use the older tools achieves the same end.

TMTOWTDI, after all!

@CppGuy @neil

@CppGuy Right, so the first and main reason is that I found AWK before Perl and became *really* comfortable with it very quickly.

Secondly, when Perl came along and I started to look at it, I found it difficult to impossible to convert half my programs, because *lots* of my programs follow the underlying structure of:

/Pattern/ { Action }

Re-creating that structure in Perl seemed ... sub-optimal.

It also seemed sub-optimal to learn two languages that fill very similar paces. In my experience there are few places where Perl is clearly better than AWK.

And I always found problems understanding how Perl thinks about variables, whereas in AWK I can see *exactly* what's going on. Perhaps the tutorials I started with were poor and I was left with a bad impression, but certainly my mental model of "how things work" was broken multiple times as I tried to understand Perl programs, and write my own.

So I never got "off the ground" with Perl.

I don't know it well enough to provide a clear critique of the language itself ... hence this is all just my experience.

CC: @neil @greem