Is there still any reason to learn AWK?

Like the sibling post to this I also have a bioinformatics background and awk is one of the most important tools in my toolkit. It is just so extremely fast. A few years ago I was laughing about a friend that did a lot of simple data transformation in awk and told him to save his time use python instead. He challenged me to do the same task in python. It took me longer to write and it was magnitudes slower. That was eye opening.

It is useful to be aware about the different awk implementations. For example mawk. That awk version is stupidly fast. GNU awk is already extremely fast, but if I work on a > 200gb file, I just prefix the m and the task will be done even faster. It however does not have all the features of gawk. The differences in regex support are the most painful.

A very useful feature of the GNU version of awk is the debugger. Super useful to be able to step line wise through a awk script.

If I ever have too much time I would like to take a look at that experimental llvm-awk (lawk) someone started and get it production ready. Sadly is seems abandoned currently.

In bioinformatics, awk is such a wonderfully useful tool - most of the data in read alignments/genomics is either in tab delimited format or is easily converted from there (via bedtools, samtools, bamtools etc.), so that it's easy to get relevant stats via a quick chain that ends in awk.

There's even a fork of awk called bioawk which adds a few commonly needed functions (treat common bioinformatics files as tab delimited files etc.).

The recent bioinformatics book Bioinformatics Data Skills from Vince Buffalo has a whole chapter on using awk in bioinformatics. Since reading it I've gone from writing 10, 20 line python helper scripts that calculate stats for the publication to just using one line in awk. (Downside: a 20 line python helper script is still in the folder next week and is at least a little bit reproducible, simpler awk stuff disappears in the history if you're not careful)

tl;dr: in bioinformatics it's a boon.