AWK was preceded by sed (1974). Both were designed for text processing. They share the line-oriented, data-driven paradigm, and are particularly suited to writing one-liner programs, due to the implicit main loop and current line variables. The power and terseness of early AWK programs – notably the powerful regular expression handling and conciseness due to implicit variables, which facilitate one-liners – together with the limitations of AWK at the time, were important inspirations for the Perl language (1987). In the 1990s, Perl became very popular, competing with AWK in the niche of Unix text-processing languages.