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. :-)
Anyways, I was talking about how this thing totally misappropriated awk, not awk itself.