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> Robbins believes that AWK's lack of namespaces is one of the key reasons it hasn't caught on as a larger-scale programming language AWK never caught on as a
by VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
> Robbins believes that AWK's lack of namespaces is one of the key reasons it hasn't caught on as a larger-scale programming language
AWK never caught on as a large-scale programming language because it's an esoteric language for processing text-based streams. Not because it didn't support "namespaces". Don't kid yourselves about "what coulda been..."
- Spivak 6y agoI mean that describes bash as well and it’s pretty darn popular. Had awk been where it is today twenty years ago it could have been the glue systems language instead of bash for non-interactive usage.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago20 years ago, there was Perl that was often claimed to replace sed and awk: I remember several books that said things like “there’s no reason to use awk now that we have Perl”
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tgv 6y agoIt's not that esoteric, It's a great language for certain, smaller problems, but no more than that. There's no way I would write a larger program in awk. Not everything is a stream of lines with string fields. Plus, awk's performance is not great, the way you have to introduce local variables is more than awkward, and there are no structs.