Like a sculpture made out of snot,you can applaud the elegance of the sculpture, and the elegance of the construction, but you have to wonder about the building material...
Ah but awk is great! It's parsimony when processing structured text files is hard to beat. Such a pity the next step on from it is perl. Perl is snot certainly.
In all seriousness, Ruby is Awk's grandchild borne of a virtuous union between Perl and Python.
After looking at the code I'd agree that it's not really idiomatic Awk. But come on, snot? I would've said a humble yet more dignified medium, such as match-sticks.
But I'd say that ideologically, ruby is far closer to awk than perl is. And yeah, matchsticks would have been better. I do actually LIKE awk, and will defend it from anybody who says that it is useless or badly designed.
This is your father's awk. An elegant weapon for a more... civilized age. :-)