It takes a lot less time to learn to be fairly productive with awk than with, say, vi / vim. Over time I've realized that gluing these text manipulation tools t

It takes a lot less time to learn to be fairly productive with awk than with, say, vi / vim. Over time I've realized that gluing these text manipulation tools together is only an intermediate step toward learning how to write and use them in a manner that is maintainable across several generations of engineers as well as portable across many different environments, and that's still a mostly unsolved problem IMO for not just shell scripts but programming languages in general. For example, the same shell script that does something as seemingly simple as performing a sha256 checksum on macOS won't work on most Linux distributions. So in the end one winds up writing a lot of utilities all over again in yet another language for the sake of portability which ironically hurts maintainability and readability for sure because it's simply more code that can rot.