If evolving can be considered synomymous with immature, you are right. AWK is an old (and comparatively small) language frozen in time, so it's not surprising that the 10-year old interpreters work perfectly well. Perl is always experimenting, which I agree is problematic from a systems administrator's point of view. And since many sysadmins don't care about upgrading perl, I often end up having my own version on my ~/bin directories...