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Comment by getpost | Hacker News Reader

I know lots of people like awk, but I pretend it doesn't exist. Why? Here's my comment on this from 6 years ago[0],

>I used awk until I learned Python (long ago). For me, awk was yet another example of the "worse is better" approach to things so common in unix. For example, if you make a syntax error, you might get a message like "glob: exec error," rather than an informative message. "Worse is better" is probably a good strategy in business and for getting things done, but still, mediocrity and the sense of entitlement that so often goes with carelessness, sickens me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13457265

Long live the Unix Hater's Handbook! (Unix is fine, and so are the criticisms herein. Some of these criticisms have been eclipsed by ongoing development.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook

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You are missing out. As a former data engineer/current SRE, I spend my entire day with VSCode/Python/Notebooks/CoPilot banging out python code - but whenever I need to do a complex analysis of a semistructured text file in < 60 seconds, awk is my twitch reflex tool. It can trivially do state transition based on patterns in the file, as well as populate hashes from one file and use them in analysis of the next file in just a few characters.

Awk's claim to fame in my world is that it's cognitive activation energy for anyone who has taken the 3-4 hours to learn the language from start to finish (and that's the awesome thing about the language - it really is about 3 hours of concentrated attention) - is essentially nil. You see a bunch of ugly not really structured text 500 MB files that you can't pull into pandas, or easily parse into python dicts? No problem - awk will tear through them for you and get the information you want in < 60 seconds, including the time you took to write your (almostl always single line) of code.

That's Awk's sweet spot.

Point taken. I have a Python program that is an elemental version of awk, and I use that for the odd task. I can modify it if needed and I have the entire Python library to help me. Is the text Unicode? HTML? These little details matter.

I'm not complaining that someone banged out awk (speaking figuratively) on a Friday afternoon to do something and not have to stay after work. Excellent! My complaint is that the failure to address technical debt has negatively affected the productivity of millions, if not tens of millions, of people, often working under pressure, for DECADES.

I'm not sure what technical debt you are referring to. Awk is designed to do one very simple job, and it does so using a language that I can usually teach to new SREs in < 2 Hours with 9-10 follow up tasks that drill in their understanding.

It's benefited from extraordinarily enlightened stewardship, kept it's minimalism and strengths, and will finally get a key enhancement (UTF-8 support).

The first edition manual is probably the greatest example I've ever seen of technical writing as well.

In general Perl fits that niche for me better, but sometimes awk is what you have.

I will bet you $1000 that time spent learning Awk will lead to better results much faster than time spent polluting your privileged user directories with Python's excuse for "dependency management"

I agree entirely!

For many python users, it’s the only language they know. Often, they see programming in python, as part of their “identity” - so they’re overly invested in it, to the detriment of other wonderful languages, like awk.

I used to code perl myself, back in the day - but I came to appreciate the simplicity of awk, and now it’s one of my favourites. I no longer code perl, as a consequence, as I believe awk to be far more elegant! I wouldn’t have done so, if I was overly invested in being a “perl programmer”.

Specifically, Awk is a good solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place. Why am I having to write these bespoke parsers for the random mess of output formats that you get from the UNIX command line?

Well, the fact is that I have to write such parsers. That's very sad, but has no chance of being fixed. So it's good to know Awk.

I think Erik Naggum had this exact criticism of Perl.

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