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A little Awk goes a long way
Tue May 26 15:47:49 PDT 2009
You may have been wondering why this site has been so static of recent times. My web obsession of late has been awk.info.
Awk is a decades old computer language- hardly bright and shiny life Ruby of OCaml or C# or.... But dude, it works. When I am prototyping ideas, this language is the best. I keep having attacks of other languages (Ruby, Python, Lisp, Smalltalk,...) but in the end, its dear old Awk that I keep returning too.
Most people see Awk as a language for writing two line scripts- buts its much more than that. At awk.info I've collected examples of Lisp interpreters in Awk, entire OO languages coded up as Awk pre-processors to "C", massive great word processing and macro language toolkits, etc etc.
Also, the language has another advantage- there is barely anything in it. No advanced data structures, pointers, memory management, etc etc. So if I explain an Awk program to someone, that explanation is not about the code. Rather, it quickly becomes about the thing the code is doing. And I like that- lets me use Awk to talk about other things.
