I felt precisely the same for a long time. Then I started following Unix SO and realized that people are being taught the bad habits. I tried answering a few a

I felt precisely the same for a long time. Then I started following Unix SO and realized that people are being taught the bad habits. I tried answering a few awk questions being verbose and explaining the steps. But I noticed that most are not asking to learn but to get a quick fix. Soon after that came the second realization: several of the answers did not understand what they where doing. My conclusion: We are living in a cut'n'paste world were actual understanding is less valued. Naturally code reuse is nice. But I doubt that many users are able to construct their magic awk snippets from the ground up. Hence the prolific terse magic snippets.