I sat down and read through the Awk manual once just to learn and was pleasantly surprised at how orthogonal the language is and how much it offers.
The only problem is that it was written by people using ed on PDP computers and that kind of shows. The primary logic is "filter out lines X and apply transform Y" is completely natural to someone using an editor like ed, but is fairly foreign to modern computer users. Most people aren't going to take the time to learn an obscure commandline tool these days, especially since it comes from the Dennis Ritchie school of "errors are like angry housewives, you know what you did" debugging.
The only problem is that it was written by people using ed on PDP computers and that kind of shows. The primary logic is "filter out lines X and apply transform Y" is completely natural to someone using an editor like ed, but is fairly foreign to modern computer users. Most people aren't going to take the time to learn an obscure commandline tool these days, especially since it comes from the Dennis Ritchie school of "errors are like angry housewives, you know what you did" debugging.