I take it you LOVE ada :-) There is a lot of wisdom in the things you avoid, however I would ask one question, "How often do you use it?" For me, the best sys

I take it you LOVE ada :-) There is a lot of wisdom in the things you avoid, however I would ask one question, "How often do you use it?" For me, the best systems are those that can be wordy and prescriptive but as you get to know them you can use more short hand so they "get out of the way" as it were. A good example of that philosophy is keyboard short cuts. When I'm learning a program I'm happy to pause and sling the mouse around to find the thing I need in the labeled menu stack with an appropriate name which also tells me what the keyboard short cut is for that thing. Then as I get better I can just use the short cut and my workflow gets faster. Once I've internalized the keymap my flow is held up by how fast I can think, not by how fast I can take my hand off the keyboard, move the mouse, click and then put it back on the keyboard. Awk is one of those things that once you internalize what it can do, you can use it for a lot of stuff, and you can do it quickly.