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I mostly use awk over perl because awk is completely documented in one man page, so it's easy to see whether awk will be fit for purpose or whether I should wri
by telotortium 3y ago
I mostly use awk over perl because awk is completely documented in one man page, so it's easy to see whether awk will be fit for purpose or whether I should write it using a real programming language. I learned Perl over a decade ago, but not the really concise dialect you would use on the command line for stuff I'd use awk for, and I've forgotten almost all of it now. At least with awk it's easy to relearn the functions I need when I need it.
- ajross 3y agoRight, which is sort of my point. 20 years ago, "everyone" knew perl, at least to the extent of knowing the standard idioms for different environments that you're talking about. And in that world, "everyone" would choose perl for these tasks, knowing that everyone else would be expert enough to read and maintain them. Perl was the natural choice. And in a world where perl is a natural choice for these tasks, awk doesn't have a niche. Because at the end of the day awk is simply an inferior language. Which is the bit I find funny: we threw out and forgot about a great tool, and now we think that the ancestral toy it replaced is a good idea again.