> Why doesn't it get used more? Few people know it, even fewer people like it. It tends to be taught really badly. There are not many recent books, and the old

> Why doesn't it get used more? Few people know it, even fewer people like it. It tends to be taught really badly. There are not many recent books, and the old ones teach an outdated pre-ISO-standard language and tend to overemphasize use of the cut (!) operator. Practical aspects needed to build "real-world" systems are almost never discussed. (Interfacing with the operating system in various ways, exceptions and other ways of robust error handling, judicious use of mutable data structures when needed, debugging, profiling, optimization, ...) But yes, if you get over all these hurdles, it's useful for many things. > And can you interface to it using Python or some more mainstream languages? Yes, but you might have to go through foreign function interfaces that are painful from both ends. Or, depending on circumstances, you can just use text files (or pipes) to communicate with an external program written in the other language.