Except, I know how to slice and dice text with awk, and can do it without leaning on ChatGPT or studying language documentation. Never made the leap to perl, the few times I tried I was put off because to a newbie the language looks like gibberish.
I would never consider perl for anything new in 2024. I still use awk very regularly.
> Except, I know how to slice and dice text with awk
I meant to say something more like "if you need to learn awk to do it, you may as well learn Perl instead". I figured from context that if you're "considering using awk", you don't know it, or you'd be "using awk". But no matter.
Perl can do everything Awk can, at least as well if not better. As fiddly, arbitrary, and limited, as Awk is, it's a lot less language, and that does come with advantages.
But I know from experience that you can learn the Awk subset of Perl as easily as you can learn Awk, and then you have a basis for extension to more tasks of a similar nature. If you want to see what I mean, there's a utility a2p[0] which translates Awk to Perl, this suffers slightly from machine translation, but it's a good demonstration that Perl can do everything Awk can in not just a trivial sense, but in the sense that it's designed to make Awk unnecessary.
So if you can get over whatever aesthetic hangup you have about Perlian line noise, you might discover you like it. Anyone using Awk "very regularly" is leaving a lot of potential on the table by refusing to learn Perl. Then again, sometimes it's best to stick with what you know.
I would never consider perl for anything new in 2024. I still use awk very regularly.