Awk as a major systems programming language, revisited (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Awk as a major systems programming language, revisited (2018)

skeeve.com

116 pointsgoranmoomin14 comments

I feel like I might hold the record for the most absurd AWK success story, which I hope to write up some day.

I wrote the front-end for what became my highest-traffic website (RhymeZone.com) in AWK back in 1996, and it ran for 27 years with just occasional feature additions every few years, serving up to 2 million pages a day from a single medium-size EC2 instance at its peak. Even in 1996 it seemed like a bad idea to make a website in pure awk, but looking back I'm glad I did.

I would love to see the code.

I love rhymezone, I use it all the time! Thanks!

Any chance you could release the source code some day? I'm very curious how you pulled this off!

Thanks for making RhymeZone. I use it for wordplay and jokes when I'm posting.

You’ve contributed to more than one of my songs and poems! Thanks!

In my mind, the greatest strength of awk as a scripting language is its widespread availability. Whether you're using a modern Mac fresh out of the box, GitBash on a windows machine, or talking to a router over SSH, you can be confident that some version of awk is close at hand. The cost of this ubiquity, however, is extreme fragmentation. As is usually the case with GNU extensions, gawk provides a variety of shiny baubles which absolutely cannot be counted upon if you want to write a portable script. As a result, they're traps for the unwary to at least the same extent as they are handy tools.

There are a variety of small features which could greatly enhance the flexibility of awk, including things described in this article and more ambitious ideas like making associative arrays first-class values, but if they aren't broadly supported, I don't imagine they'd have much impact. If I need to install a specific version of awk to run a script (and I have the ability to do so), I could just as easily install one of dozens of other capable scripting languages instead.

My first question to any programming question is, "can I reasonably solve this with awk?" exactly for its ubiquity.

I stick to the POSIX standard for the reasons you note: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/a...

If POSIX awk is insufficient, then I probably should be using something other than awk, so its limits are actually a good guardrail; however, it's shocking how powerful POSIX awk is with built-in arrays, hashmaps, regular expressions, etc., although no doubt there are quirks.

And this is where Perl 5 says hi. It's also widespread and easily available, can do anything awk can, and isn't similarly fractured (Raku now being its own spinoff world). The article's complaints about its syntax are a matter of taste, of course.

And the article's complaint about its stat() interface, while accurate in theory, misses the existence of https://p3rl.org/File::stat (and there's some similar other modules for things like localtime()) which gives you named access.

Also being able to use https://p3rl.org/App::FatPack to bundle (pure perl) dependencies along with your code into a single script file to ship around makes life significantly easier deployment-wise (and https://p3rl.org/Object::Remote allows for 'no deployment at all', it runs 'ssh <target> perl -' and ships the code it needs across the wire on connect).

Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22304017 - Feb 2020 (80 comments)

I was impressed with awk generally, having discovered it by accident as an alternative to bash and node.js for various data wrangling tasks.

The frawk implementation written in rust seemed very fast.

I could not find a good way to emit binary files directly, and settled on using a unix util hex2bin or something like that. If I knew a nice way to handle binary, Id program more in awk.

both posix awk and the one true awk have printf: https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk/blob/2bab10b60b3f4d3bbefdc...

(that said, I usually use awk's ability to print through pipelines given in the awk script itself)

Here is a yak-shaving challenge I posed for your amusement: https://www.reddit.com/r/commandline/comments/1bnehga/find_c...

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