This is fair, but argument in favor of the approach is that it is so simple it really could be done with any backend language {EDIT: by a 1st year CS student in

This is fair, but argument in favor of the approach is that it is so simple it really could be done with any backend language {EDIT: by a 1st year CS student in an afternoon, um, maybe.. ;-)}..Go, Pascal, Ada, even slow running ones like Python/Perl/etc. or slow compiling ones like Rust. So, were the design to be more common people might not be so prone to make that assumption. OTOH, getting people to not make wrong assumptions is an eternal challenge. :-) My own view is that awk was done more or less for these one-liner/simple purposes but by people like Aho for whom full featured languages are barely more thinking than my 60 lines (in either doing the parser or using). :-)