You nailed it. Perl replaced awk and then turned out to be counterproductive in a lot of cases because there was no simple and broadly understood way for people to write Perl code that was 1) readable for other programmers and 2) scalable to medium-to-large programs.
Which is not to say that nobody ever figured out those things and did them well, just that the success rate was low enough across the industry to earn Perl a really bad reputation.
I'd like to see a revival of awk. It's less easy to scale up, so there's very little risk that starting a project with a little bit of awk results in the next person inheriting a multi-thousand line awk codebase. Instead, you get an early-ish rewrite into a more scalable and maintainable language.
Which is not to say that nobody ever figured out those things and did them well, just that the success rate was low enough across the industry to earn Perl a really bad reputation.
I'd like to see a revival of awk. It's less easy to scale up, so there's very little risk that starting a project with a little bit of awk results in the next person inheriting a multi-thousand line awk codebase. Instead, you get an early-ish rewrite into a more scalable and maintainable language.