Yes, writing shell scripts calling awk and sed was awful, just an aesthetic nightmare to work with. Properly quoting strings was always problematic, and while Usenet was available there wasn't a plethora of information like nowadays. This was a few years before Bash was released.

Through my use of Usenet I learned that a better reader program was available called 'rn', which I downloaded and built. It had an amazing handwritten install script (autoconf was years off) which could automatically configure and build rn on any *NIX system. All developed by a fellow named Larry Wall.

rn was truly a joy to use and made reading Usenet swift and efficient. It would get updated with the fixes that came across Usenet that I'd apply using the clever 'patch' program, also written by Larry Wall.

Based on my experience with his other software, when Larry Wall released Perl on Usenet I immediately downloaded, built, and started using it. As promised, for scripting things not requiring a C program, it was massive improvement. Version 2.0 came out and brought many great new capabilities.

I wasn't writing software while versions 3 and 4 came out; I started using it again after version 5 and the appearance of CPAN. Over the years I've used Perl extensively for task automation and data wrangling.

Python now dominates Perl's niche because it's easier to learn and interfaces better with C. It's also less flexible, which compared to Perl is a virtue. One of Perl's mottos is TMTOWTDI—there's more than one way to do it. But many of them are bad. Much of Perl's poor reputation ("line noise") stems from this.

But when Perl was released it was a revelation, like a drab day when the clouds suddenly part letting warm sunlight pour down on the land.