I also became aware of this from Kernighan's interview on Computerphile. And I thought to myself "man, such an omnipresent and fundamental piece of software doe

I also became aware of this from Kernighan's interview on Computerphile. And I thought to myself "man, such an omnipresent and fundamental piece of software doesn't have UTF-8 support yet?" and then I thought that, after >20 years of using awk in my script, I never had the urge to use it to parse UTF-8 - but I guess that it's just the luck of living in a country that uses a Latin alphabet, and I couldn't imagine how people could use it on documents in e.g. Chinese or Arabic. This was really an example of how discriminatory software is when it comes to languages.