I occasionally pull out SNOBOL4 as a less-awful awk, mostly for poking around/formatting logs and such. Not a bad language honestly. It's aged very well.

People mention it here on occasion for how it handles string processing. Experts in such things might want to dive deep in a review of it for the rest of us.

Icon was also produced by the same man, Ralph Griswold. And it has inspired a newer incarnation, Unicon. I imagine each would also be pretty good at string processing.