[lapsed_lisper]

ISTM one could use the same premises to reach the opposite conclusion, namely, that because awk is basically a subset of Perl (excluding CPAN, of course), many things are easier to read, often resulting in more regular, if sometimes longer code. :-)

(FWIW, I learned Perl before sed and awk, and when I was using Perl every day, it was easy enough to whip up one-liners and throwaway scripts. However, I find that as I stopped using Perl on a day-to-day basis about 17 years ago, I can't produce Perl without re-learning the language; but I can produce sed and awk a few times per year without any refresher. I suspect that -- for me -- the smallness of each of sed and awk has something to do with it. YMMV, of course.)