I've written one or two awk programs that probably went beyond what the tool was intended for, but mostly I use short one-liners or small scripts. I use awk, grep, sed, and xargs pretty much daily for all kinds of ad-hoc automation.
Not sure what that would mean. I think the tool was designed to be a user's programming language. I liken to think that `awk` was the Excel + VBScript of its days.