"Looking like sh/awk/sed" is not the big win Perl evangelists thought it was. Quite the opposite!

People who have actually used sh/awk/sed know quite well how terrible they are.

I remember Perl evangelists bragging about "associative arrays" as if they were God's Gift to Humanity that no other language could touch, only because they knew no other language. Not even realizing how much more limited Perl's associative arrays were because of its complete lack of reasonable reference semantics.