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"nothing stops you from generalizing this to say a frame from a video" This is 100% true. A coworker of mine implemented an elevation-bitmap-to-3d-model conver

"nothing stops you from generalizing this to say a frame from a video" This is 100% true. A coworker of mine implemented an elevation-bitmap-to-3d-model conversion tool in 160 lines of Awk. It ran faster than our "good" Matlab tool by a factor of 10. Awk (or Perl) doubles the usefulness of Unix. Most of the common commands in Unix are query commands. When you need to start manipulating queried data, Awk is where the rubber meets the road. Piping data through the shell stops being read-only, and becomes interactive.

silentbicycle 16y ago
> It ran faster than our "good" Matlab tool by a factor of 10. Could you give a bit more details there? I don't have any experience with matlab, but I tend to think of awk as fast to write code in (and start up), though not particularly fast in execution. (Roughly on par with Python, i.e., usually good enough.)
- goosemo 16y ago
  You might want to rethink that a bit: http://anyall.org/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and-most-elegant-big-data-munging-language/ http://anyall.org/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and...
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    That's mawk. I'm talking about the implementation that post calls "nawk", and either way, I mean orders of magnitude - I care about a 10-100+x difference in speed, not a 1.1-5x one. Awk and Python fall in roughly the same performance tier for that kind of code. Also: "I have since found large datasets where mawk is buggy and gives the wrong result. nawk seems safe." makes me uneasy, as does the fact that it was unmaintained for a while.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Afaict, mawk's maintenance seems to be a bit up in the air--- the original maintainer basically disappeared years ago and hasn't blessed any successor, so the Debian-patched version became the de-facto current version, since at least it staved off bitrot. Recently someone (Thomas Dickey) picked up maintenance of a new upstream version unilaterally, starting from the Debian-patched version, but he hasn't managed to convince the Debian mawk maintainer to accept his new version as a new upstream (somewhat testy thread here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=554167 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=554167). I'm personally a little more comfortable with something actively maintained like gawk, despite the speed differences.
      - silentbicycle 16y ago
        Right. I usually use (n)awk because it's the default on OpenBSD, but have to admit gawk's artificial-filesystem-based networking support is pretty cool.
  - silentbicycle 16y ago
    Ultimately, what are you implying? Am I wrong? Awk (any implementation) isn't as fast as C, LuaJIT, or OCaml. It's likely to be good enough for many things, though (certainly prototyping), and it's definitely convenient for quick scripts.

silentbicycle 16y ago

> It ran faster than our "good" Matlab tool by a factor of 10. Could you give a bit more details there? I don't have any experience with matlab, but I tend to think of awk as fast to write code in (and start up), though not particularly fast in execution. (Roughly on par with Python, i.e., usually good enough.)

goosemo 16y ago
You might want to rethink that a bit: http://anyall.org/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and-most-elegant-big-data-munging-language/ http://anyall.org/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and...
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  That's mawk. I'm talking about the implementation that post calls "nawk", and either way, I mean orders of magnitude - I care about a 10-100+x difference in speed, not a 1.1-5x one. Awk and Python fall in roughly the same performance tier for that kind of code. Also: "I have since found large datasets where mawk is buggy and gives the wrong result. nawk seems safe." makes me uneasy, as does the fact that it was unmaintained for a while.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Afaict, mawk's maintenance seems to be a bit up in the air--- the original maintainer basically disappeared years ago and hasn't blessed any successor, so the Debian-patched version became the de-facto current version, since at least it staved off bitrot. Recently someone (Thomas Dickey) picked up maintenance of a new upstream version unilaterally, starting from the Debian-patched version, but he hasn't managed to convince the Debian mawk maintainer to accept his new version as a new upstream (somewhat testy thread here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=554167 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=554167). I'm personally a little more comfortable with something actively maintained like gawk, despite the speed differences.
    - silentbicycle 16y ago
      Right. I usually use (n)awk because it's the default on OpenBSD, but have to admit gawk's artificial-filesystem-based networking support is pretty cool.
- silentbicycle 16y ago
  Ultimately, what are you implying? Am I wrong? Awk (any implementation) isn't as fast as C, LuaJIT, or OCaml. It's likely to be good enough for many things, though (certainly prototyping), and it's definitely convenient for quick scripts.