[mywittyname]

Applications in awk? No.

It's still a popular tool in the data processing realm. It's crazy to think that bash scripts using pipes is still one of the most memory efficient ways of processing file-based data. Even tools like Apache Airflow just went ahead and incorporated bash for this exact reason.

[shagie]

In the back of this 80s book that I've got somewhere there's a set of programs that are 5-7 printed pages long... and written entirely in awk.

A short example of that type of thing - https://people.sc.fsu.edu/~sshanbhag/awk-shell/histogram.awk

For the time, that was likely a very reasonable solution. But for today's world, there are better solutions.