[mcculley]

This is beautiful.

I'm reminded of an administration tool I wrote using AWK and ANSI command sequences. It was the most powerful programming language available on the machines available to me for that project. It worked great, but in the end meant that I had to fly back out to that site every time it needed maintenance or new features as nobody else there knew AWK.

[i336_]

Depending on whether the flights were stressful or a nice step away from home turf, that might be considered a feature, not a bug. It was a nice bit of job security, in any case.

I also hesitate to say that the site in question deserved to pay for the tickets, since AWK is reasonably easy to learn, even in the case of 4- or 5-digit-SLOC applications.

But if AWK was the most capable system available, that's saying a bit... :p

[mcculley]

While the job security was nice, I considered it a personal failure as I had made a choice that resulted in less flexibility for personnel allocation for my organization.

The site in question was isolated from the Internet for security reasons. This was ~1994 and I would have had to submit significant paperwork to get permission to use one of the phone lines for a modem.

As I remember it, the site had a hodgepodge of SCO Unix, SunOS, IRIX, and Linux systems. SCO Unix was the least equipped of them. Configuration management had them all stuck at an old version. Perl wasn't even installed on all of the systems. I remember feeling that AWK was a good choice because, being interpreted, it allowed for fast development. Another obvious option would have been C with X for the GUI, but that would have taken much longer to implement.

[i336_]

> While the job security was nice, I considered it a personal failure as I had made a choice that resulted in less flexibility for personnel allocation for my organization.

Good way to put it, and point conceded (and filed away for future reference in my own life).

> The site in question was isolated from the Internet for security reasons. This was ~1994 and I would have had to submit significant paperwork to get permission to use one of the phone lines for a modem.

I figured as much. Usually flying someone out only happens when the core infrastructure is out (and the tiny DSL emergency modem failed as well), when something's being so annoying/intermittent it has to be poked onsite, or when something's airgapped.

> As I remember it, the site had a hodgepodge of SCO Unix, SunOS, IRIX, and Linux systems. SCO Unix was the least equipped of them. Configuration management had them all stuck at an old version. Perl wasn't even installed on all of the systems.

Ouch, wow. (I'm not sure whether to be more impressed that Linux made an appearance at all only 3 years after entering existence, or that it was apparently stable enough at that point to not be laughed out of the building.)

> I remember feeling that AWK was a good choice because, being interpreted, it allowed for fast development.

A problem that's still a toss-up for many people :) hah. I'm not even sure what to use half the time...

> Another obvious option would have been C with X for the GUI, but that would have taken much longer to implement.

Ah, the joys of Xlib. I've poked it briefly but not too much, although I can resonate with the "much longer to implement" part... heh

[mcculley]

> I'm not sure whether to be more impressed that Linux made an appearance at all only 3 years after entering existence, or that it was apparently stable enough at that point to not be laughed out of the building.

I was young and so was Linux. I was the only available Linux guy at that time in that organization. The site was running some experiments for military training simulators, so it wasn't uncommon to use technology that wasn't yet mainstream. If I remember correctly, it was just being used to translate some data from one system and inject it into another.