On: Fascination of Awk

[pphysch]

A naive AWK solution (extract+transform text) will vastly outperform a naive Python solution in throughput and memory footprint.

It's absolutely efficient to learn, because there isn't much to learn.

[klodolph → pphysch]

A lot of people already know how to write Python or Perl or something, and given that background, the case for learning Awk is more difficult.

I mean, I like Awk, but I’ve also been programming for a long time and I’ve amortized the cost of learning Awk.

[pphysch → klodolph]

My case for learning AWK is if you spend any significant chunk of time in the terminal (sysadmin, DevOps, data eng). Notwithstanding any other scripting languages you know.

CLI world is full of bespoke text interfaces. AWK is the tool for dealing with those programmatically.