>> To this day, 90% of the programmers I talk to have never used awk. Ok, time for someone that doesn't regularly use awk to say something. I understand that a

>> To this day, 90% of the programmers I talk to have never used awk. Ok, time for someone that doesn't regularly use awk to say something. I understand that awk is great. The language being terse is nice if you use it regularly, but otherwise it's very easy to forget, and it's strange to look at it the first time. 90% of the programmers probably don't regularly need the kind of functionality awk provides, and the few times they do, they can create a simple script in a language they know better. Awk can be a super useful tool, but I think it's reasonable that most programmers don't use it, and the language is not designed to be used by everyone. In my opinion, a more universal alternative to this would be something like a web application that allows visual programming and translates the operations to awk, and possibly other languages too (the visual language could encode only a subset of awk, only common operations). You would learn awk yourself if you use it regularly, and you would know that you can simply use an intuitive interface to solve those formatting problems you need to handle from time to time otherwise.