The good thing about awk is that it's limited. So you know when to stop using it and move to use a different language when your requirements exceed the comfort

The good thing about awk is that it's limited. So you know when to stop using it and move to use a different language when your requirements exceed the comfort zone of awk. Larry Wall came and made a language inspired by awk that doesn't give feedback on when you're out of the comfort zone. This lets you make a mess before you know what you've done (aka technical debt). The same problem 'that killed Smalltalk and could have killed ruby' too (thanks, Bob Martin).