That's a large part of what's driving Awk's renaissance: devs that never learned Perl to begin with want something to fill the gap between shell and Python, and other devs like me who (reluctantly) abandoned Perl because it was deemed "uncool" by HN types, which means Perl and all code written in it now has an expiration date on it. But since Awk is a POSIX standard, HN types can't get rid of it.
To me, hell is having to debug perl scripts other people wrote. Based on experiences in the 1998 time frame.
Because you have only yourself to blame.
I stopped using Perl because my egg drop bots got laborious along with my expect scripts. They were novel early on, but maintaining them became something of a chore I wasn't inclined to do anymore. Other things started to do that better.
Personally, I think Python won because it's syntax was much more readable. It had nothing to do with technical merits. DX is a strong subliminal motivator.
Grab https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sabotage-linux/sabotage/ma... and clobber the perl script in the Linux source.
Then: sed -i -e 's@perl $(srctree)/$(src)/build_OID_registry@awk -f $(srctree)/$(src)/build_OID_registry@' ./lib/Makefile
They also removed the perl dependency for ca-certificates since one of the goals was to remove perl dependencies from the core system including its toolchain and kernel. It's not needed at all now.
This Aho project is neat because it has the potential of removing the perl dependency on having a git client, which was a problem prior.