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I worked on a project which was indecently large/successful that ran on awk. No details (NDA) but there, you now have confirmation that there exists a producti

by patio11 14y ago

I worked on a project which was indecently large/successful that ran on awk. No details (NDA) but there, you now have confirmation that there exists a production system on AWK. Obligatory disclaimer, quoting Chris Rock: "You can drive a car with your feet if you have to, but that don't make it a good idea." There are SUBSTANTIAL advantages to switching to e.g. ruby, which gives you all the fun of scripting languages and also a community which has already poured thousands of man-years of effort into making stuff you can use for web applications, rather than you spending time implementing e.g. the world's first (and worst) oAuth/Twitter wrapper for gawk.

bgilroy26 14y ago
>and also a community which has already poured thousands of man-years of effort into making stuff you can use for web applications I would wager a goodly amount that you've hit the nail on the head here. It seemed at first as though bundling all of the unix environment together and abandoning "The Unix Way" was a triumph of advertising and people's laziness. Thinking further, it's pretty clear that mobilizing a community around a varied basket of tools would have been nigh impossible. It's pretty interesting how important this developer/social aspect has been to the development of the web. Larry Wall has certainly been in on the joke all along.