[Klathmon]

That's incredibly dismissive.

AWK isn't perfect (nothing is). So that means that there are still improvements that can be made to it. One of the improvements to AWK (or something awk-like) would be to make it have a more familiar syntax to those who don't already know awk.

I'll admit, the only thing I use awk for currently is to pull out columns of the output to pass on to the next tool. I know it can do more, but I don't have time to really learn and understand the langauge.

While I don't like many things about this project, I really like some of the ideas that it's suggesting. I'd love a "awk but with javascript" where you can use a subset of javascript to work like awk where you can pipe in data and have it output "regular" lines that can be passed to the next tool on the command line.

letting me use familiar javascript functions and syntax to map/reduce/filter over lines of input and output plaintext would be amazing. This doesn't quite do that in the way I want, but it's a cool thing nonetheless.

[Aneurysm9_]

Just gonna leave this here. https://github.com/synacor/dtk

Its filter functions are Perl, but you could do something similar with JS if you were a masochist. No need to build a new shell, though.