Why Learn Awk? (2016)
I gave awk a sincere attempt, but I have to say that it wasn&#x27;t worth it. As soon as one tries to write anything bigger than a one liner the language shows its warts.. I found myself writing lots of helper routines for things that should be part of the base language&#x2F;library, e.g. sets with existence check. I also had to work around portability issues, because awk is not awk, unlike this post claims. E.g. matching a part of a line is different among different awks.<p>And some language decisions are just asinine, e.g. how function parameters and variable scope works, fall through by default although you almost never want that, etc..<p>But hey, you have socket support! Sounds to me like things have developed in the wrong direction.<p>And of course no one on your team will know awk.<p>I found the idea of rule-based programming interesting, but the way it interacts with delimiters and sections (switching rules when encountering certain lines) doesn&#x27;t work well in practice.<p>I also found the performance to be very disappoinging when I compared it to C and python equivalents.