Well ... awk is great, but only up to a certain level of complexity. The standard language has only global variables. It's got no real support for functional style. There's no standardized library system. Oh, and it can't reliably distinguish STDERR from STDOUT. So there are a bunch of kludges to get around all the deficiencies, which results in awk programs which look like a retarded dialect of C.

IMHO the best parts of awk are regex literals, natural pipeline participation, and familiar/simple syntax. Sitting down to write a complete program in awk start to finish though ... no thanks.