Oh, I absolutely wasn't criticising you in any way! Mostly, I just felt like trying to spell out for myself why I like this thing.

And the awk comment was aimed at a certain kind of person who seem totally unable to see that making things easy is at least as important as making them possible. I have once seen someone seriously say that he didn't understand why people got excited about some feature or another in Perl (I don't remember which one), because you could do the same thing with self-modifying awk. I found that comment sufficiently bizarre that it's stuck in my mind ever since.