It's also easy for people coming from Perl, given that Perl was designed to be easy for people coming from Unix shell, which includes awk.

Python and Ruby aren't that far removed, but the idea of a one-liner as such is alien to the Python mindset, I suppose.

Or JavaScript programmers. JavaScript's function syntax came from AWK.

First time I read that but well the spec says so. http://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/jsspec11/intro.htm#1006028