The Unreasonable Effectiveness of AWK

I've done a lot of prototyping with AWK, and as with all good prototypes, a lot of them lingered in production for years without so much as a glitch.

I also did the entire 2020 AoC in mainly AWK, with some help of the shell at large at points.

I don't really have a point to make other than showing my appreciation of this quirky tool.

I realize the author was probably using the term "unreasonable" for literary effect.

But it's not unreasonable at all. Aho of the "Dragon Book", Weinberger of Bell Labs, and of course Brian Kernighan of K&R.

One would expect nothing less, really and they did not disappoint.

Stephen Ramsey is an interesting geek! "[A]n Associate Professor of English and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities". He's an English major all the way to PhD. The title of one of his books proved sufficiently tantalizing to motivate a search:

Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism, 2011:

http://www.dansinykin.com/uploads/8/4/0/2/84026824/ramsay_al...

    We’re not creating file handles and opening files (or closing them)

In the past I've had to write awk scripts that explicitly close files since it's quite easy to run out of file descriptors/reach an awk imposed limit.