[Millennium]

The site's called Hacker News for a reason, and it caters to entrepreneurs for the same reason. We're already people with something of a penchant for not caring about the "practical" or "reasonable," or even considering that to be a challenge.

But if we're going to talk about what is practical and reasonable, then let's look back at awk's niche: prying data out of line-oriented text files. For that particular task, C and the basic lisps rank among my languages of last resort: assembler (pick an architecture) would be worse, but that's just about it. There are libraries for these languages which would help significantly, but my awk script would be finished and halfway through the dataset by the time I even got the build environment set up for these languages, and the code would still be more clear.

Like I said, the right tool for the job. For many tasks -most, actually- awk would not be very high on my list of languages to try. But find a task that hits awk's sweet spot, and nothing beats it.