A couple decades ago I remember somebody using awk in programming competitions, as a stunt, and doing surprisingly well. For tasks involving text processing it has a huge advantage, and it ends up doing ok with other stuff.
I’ve had people be very confused and perplexed when I told them awk is a programming language in the past lol. Most seem to think it’s solely a tool like sort or uniq etc
What I always point out though is the bathtub curve of that perception.
Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now.
But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better.
But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl.
And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.
That's funny, and totally not what awk was designed for, but it does it anyway!
A couple decades ago I remember somebody using awk in programming competitions, as a stunt, and doing surprisingly well. For tasks involving text processing it has a huge advantage, and it ends up doing ok with other stuff.
I’ve had people be very confused and perplexed when I told them awk is a programming language in the past lol. Most seem to think it’s solely a tool like sort or uniq etc
What I always point out though is the bathtub curve of that perception.
Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now.
But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better.
But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl.
And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.
> it's made with gawk.
gawk is always best when served live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXHuygyyulE&t=53s
Early 2000s, writing your own client to join freenode was a programmer's rite. Sad to see the network implode. And no, I won't use libera or whatever.
> And no, I won't use libera or whatever.
Any special reason? AFAIK, it's effectively the same network run by the same people, just under a different name.