Not really; just seems the same as most other dynamic languages. Awk does a lot of stuff for you (the "implied loop" your program runs in, field splitting) that's certainly possible (even easy) to replicate in Python or Ruby, but Awk it's just so much more convenient.
I use it for things like processing the Unicode data files, making some program output a bit nicer (e.g. go test -bench), ad-hoc spreadsheets, few other things. I got started with it as I needed to process some C header files and the existing script for that was in Awk; it worked pretty well for that too.
Not really; just seems the same as most other dynamic languages. Awk does a lot of stuff for you (the "implied loop" your program runs in, field splitting) that's certainly possible (even easy) to replicate in Python or Ruby, but Awk it's just so much more convenient.
I use it for things like processing the Unicode data files, making some program output a bit nicer (e.g. go test -bench), ad-hoc spreadsheets, few other things. I got started with it as I needed to process some C header files and the existing script for that was in Awk; it worked pretty well for that too.
The Awk Programming Language book is pretty good. GNU Awk has a bunch of very useful extensions, but pretty much everything in the book still works and is useful today. You can get it at e.g. https://archive.org/details/awkprogrammingla00ahoa or https://github.com/teamwipro/learn_programing/blob/master/sh...
The GNU Awk docs are also pretty decent.