[zeveb]

> Very few people still code with the legacies of the 1970s: ML, Pascal, Scheme, Smalltalk.

Arguably, the software world would be better off if more people did code with those 1970s languages, than with the ones we are stuck with now.

And that applies to Awk, too. As the author quotes Neil Ormos stating, Awk is well suited for personal computing, something which we have gotten further and further from at the same time as computers have become more distributed. At what point in history have such a large fraction of the human race had the ability to calculate to such an amazing order of magnitude, and at what point in history have such a large fraction of the same human race not bothered with calculation?

Awk is a great tool precisely because it puts quite a lot of expressive power in the hands of an average user on a Unix system. Sure, on a Lisp machine or Smalltalk machine there really isn't the same need for Awk: the systems languages on such machines are safe enough and expressive enough to do what Awk does. But in the Unix context — which is basically what we're all living in, with even the VMS-derived Windows more-or-less adhering to the Unix model — Awk is a godsend.

edit: correct typo

[gompertz]

Oh man, you sound like a long lost friend. As someone who struggles to adopt really anything post ~1995 in the programming world, I couldn't agree more. I've worked for Fortune 100s my whole career; mostly in big data problem-spaces, before it ever was cool (if it even is now?), and I really feel all the problems people perceive today were solved all the way back to the 1960s (i.e. Snobol4). I understand for modern web and mobile contexts, sure there is new fancy tools for that; but as you said, in the personal computing space, the proper tools have existed for decades.