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Hi. Well, that's very dramatic language. I was asking if that's what you're saying...because that's what it seemed to me like you're saying, but it seemed stran

Hi. Well, that's very dramatic language. I was asking if that's what you're saying...because that's what it seemed to me like you're saying, but it seemed strange. Isn't that just what I should've done? Then "I deny you the right to put words in my mouth."! Hopefully you don't often say that in conversation when people ask you what you meant. So, if by > C ate the world. awk... um... ... got used for some things. > the actual usefulness of the language determines how much it is actually used. you didn't mean something like > Awk isn't "actually useful" which is why it's hardly used then what did you mean? What are you saying? Because it really seems to me like that's the impression you meant to convey.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I reply that way when someone asks if I mean X, when X is very far from what I mean to convey. Often it's done dishonestly. That is, someone asks if I mean X as an argumentative gambit, rather than because they are genuinely trying to understand my position. It sounds like you are genuinely trying to understand, so my response may have been inappropriate. I apologize. To me, it seems that awk is less used than C. As I said, "C ate the world" - it became an incredibly dominant language. If you believe the TIOBE index, C is currently (June 2020) the most popular language in the world. By comparison, awk is somewhere in the 51-100 range. So, yes, by comparison to C, awk is not used nearly as much. My larger point was this: C and awk both came from Bell Labs, both had famous people from that group involved in their creation, and both got distributed with Unix. And yet C saw (and sees) much wider use. This disproves the thesis that a language's popularity is a function only of famous people and organizational support. If those were the only factors, awk should be used as much as C, but it isn't. Why isn't awk used as much as C? Because C is useful for a wider range of things. You don't write embedded systems or operating systems in awk. awk is still quite useful. What it does, it does well. But it's less useful than C (when you consider the entire universe of programming tasks, it's useful for fewer of them), and therefore it is used less. My overall point: Fitness to the task matters for programming language use. Programmers are not just lemmings, led around by the nose to pick languages based on the fame of the author and the organization supporting the language. They actually pay some attention to whether the language is good for writing the kind of program they're trying to write. Languages that are good for writing a wider range of programs get used more than languages that are good for writing a narrower range of programs. That doesn't make the narrower languages bad or useless. It just means they will mostly be used on a smaller range of tasks.
- yesenadam 6y ago
  Thank you.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

I reply that way when someone asks if I mean X, when X is very far from what I mean to convey. Often it's done dishonestly. That is, someone asks if I mean X as an argumentative gambit, rather than because they are genuinely trying to understand my position. It sounds like you are genuinely trying to understand, so my response may have been inappropriate. I apologize. To me, it seems that awk is less used than C. As I said, "C ate the world" - it became an incredibly dominant language. If you believe the TIOBE index, C is currently (June 2020) the most popular language in the world. By comparison, awk is somewhere in the 51-100 range. So, yes, by comparison to C, awk is not used nearly as much. My larger point was this: C and awk both came from Bell Labs, both had famous people from that group involved in their creation, and both got distributed with Unix. And yet C saw (and sees) much wider use. This disproves the thesis that a language's popularity is a function only of famous people and organizational support. If those were the only factors, awk should be used as much as C, but it isn't. Why isn't awk used as much as C? Because C is useful for a wider range of things. You don't write embedded systems or operating systems in awk. awk is still quite useful. What it does, it does well. But it's less useful than C (when you consider the entire universe of programming tasks, it's useful for fewer of them), and therefore it is used less. My overall point: Fitness to the task matters for programming language use. Programmers are not just lemmings, led around by the nose to pick languages based on the fame of the author and the organization supporting the language. They actually pay some attention to whether the language is good for writing the kind of program they're trying to write. Languages that are good for writing a wider range of programs get used more than languages that are good for writing a narrower range of programs. That doesn't make the narrower languages bad or useless. It just means they will mostly be used on a smaller range of tasks.

yesenadam 6y ago
Thank you.