Yep. I voted for "other" simply because awk wasn't there. I used awk on unix and DOS (yay Thomson Toolkit), and found myself writing awk scripts that wrote their own batch files and then called those batch files to continue the processing. Ah, the good old days. It was indeed outgrowing awk's limits that led me to Perl.

These days I still find myself using awk for one-liners, because it's more compact for saying things like '{print $4}' that the corresponding Perl code.

Awk really was a godsend after having dealt with only grep and sed. I no longer remember any sed, and that's a Good Thing.

print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u'