14 More Lessons from 14 years at Google

> A feature without telemetry is a liability in disguise.

Let me just find the quote in the awk book, give me a minute...

"We, being the authors, "knew" how the language was supposed to be used, and so we only wrote one-liners.

"Awk quickly spread to other groups and users pushed hard on the language. were surprised at how rapidly awk became popular as a general-purpose programming language; our first reaction to a program that didn't fit on one page was shock and amazement. What had happened was that many people restricted their use of the computer to the shell (the command language) and to awk. Rather than writing in a "real" programming language, they were stretching the tools they liked."

New features are dangerous, but sometimes they open unexpected doors.

https://archive.org/download/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7/The_AWK_P...