I love awk as a language / framework. If it got an uplift to make it useful for more complex problems it would be an absolute winner for lots of basic data processing tasks.

I’ve often written incantations many lines long and even broken out to actually writing awk scripts from time to time.

Once the penny drops with it it’s great fun but it’s absolutely useless once your problems get to any degree of sophistication.

I typically move into Python at this stage. Perl and Ruby are probably a more elegant fit here but those aren’t rows I want to have.

In this day and age, awk really needs CSV (RFC-4180) support and better semantic scoping and library support.

I’d also think it would be neat as an embedded language for various data processing platforms but if we haven’t seen it yet I doubt we will ever see it.

EDIT support for file formats beyond plain text would also be a winner.