Awk is optimized for working with the output of other Unix tools. It's great for writing filters for larger output, like "show me the third column of all lines

Awk is optimized for working with the output of other Unix tools. It's great for writing filters for larger output, like "show me the third column of all lines in <million-line-long-logfile> that contain the word 'moose'". Of course you can do this in Python or Ruby, but it's very convenient in awk as it's really optimized for that exact task.