Awk meshes very well with a lot of my natural inclinations about text processing. I've sadly stopped using it lately as it seems that the majority of my use cases these days run up against a (to me) glaring deficiency in the language. Specifically, capture groups in pattern regexes. It's probably one of those "you're doing it wrong" kind of things, but if awk had that one feature, I probably wouldn't ever need to use perl.