It’s hard to call awk, grep, sed, lex, programming languages, don’t you think?
It would be even harder to say they popularized regular expressions, considering their very very limited reach.
I agree with the rest.
Awk is a bona fide programming language. It makes line-oriented processing extra easy, but so do Perl and Ruby.
While awk is mostly used for text processing (and general data transforms, e.g. in the Linux kernel build system), it allows for writing arbitrary programs, e.g. first-person shooters: https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster
awk is definitely a programming language, and I've seen people abuse sed in unsettling ways, but yeah, grep sure isn't. lex at least generates C source code but isn't itself a programming language. But they all definitely made regular expressions a normal programming tool well before perl existed.
