Yes. It's comparative. The absolute value of Perl's readability, maintainability, and general intuitiveness is massively better than all comparable tools that existed when Perl came out. Perl is a massive improvement over those tools.
If you have doubts, try writing a complicated production software stack in awk. Then hand it off to a coworker.
One need not be irreplaceably good, if one is already beating the current state of the art by an order of magnitude. Perl did this.
If you have doubts, try writing a complicated production software stack in awk. Then hand it off to a coworker.
One need not be irreplaceably good, if one is already beating the current state of the art by an order of magnitude. Perl did this.