WHAT'S NEW?

Mar 01: Michael Sanders demos an X-windows GUI for AWK.

Mar 01: Awk100#24: A. Lahm and E. de Rinaldis' patent search, in AWK

Feb 28: Tim Menzies asks this community to write an AWK cookbook.

Feb 28: Arnold Robbins announces a new debugger for GAWK.

Feb 28: Awk100#23: Premysl Janouch offers a IRC bot, In AWK

Feb 28: Updated: the AWK FAQ

Feb 28: Tim Menzies offers a tiny content management system, in Awk.

Jan 31: Comment system added to awk.info. For example, see discussion bottom of ?keys2awk

Jan 31: Martin Cohen shows that Gawk can handle massively long strings (300 million characters).

Jan 31: The AWK FAQ is being updated. For comments/ corrections/ extensions, please mail tim@menzies.us

Jan 31: Martin Cohen finds Awk on the Android platform.

Jan 31: Aleksey Cheusov released a new version of runawk.

Jan 31: Hirofumi Saito contributes a candidate Awk mascot.

Jan 31: Michael Sanders shows how to quickly build an AWK GUI for windows.

Jan 31: Hyung-Hwan Chung offers QSE, an embeddable Awk Interpreter.

[More ...]

categories: Misc,WhyAwk,Jan,2009,Admin

Awk Advocacy

"Because easy is not wrong." - Anon

From various sources:

• Why Awk?
• Teaching Awk
• Awk and AI

Quotes:

• "Listen to people who program, not to people who want to tell you how to program."
  - Ronald P. Loui
• "Good design is as little design as possible."
  - Dieter Rams
• "When we have on occasion rewritten an Awk program in a conventional programming language like C or C++, the result was usually much longer, and much harder to debug."
  - Arnold Robbins & Nelson Beebe

From Project Management Advice:

• More programming theory does not make better programmers.
• Don't let old/compiler people tell you what language to use.
• If there is already a way of doing something, do not invent a harder way.

From Awk programming:

• Awk is a simple and elegant pattern scanning and processing language.
• Awk is also the most portable scripting language in existence.
• But why use it rather than Perl (or PHP or Ruby or...):
  • Awk is simpler (especially important if deciding which to learn first);
  • Awk syntax is far more regular (another advantage for the beginner, even without considering syntax-highlighting editors);
  • You may already know Awk well enough for the task at hand;
  • You may have only Awk installed;
  • Awk can be smaller, thus much quicker to execute for small programs.

From Awk as a Major Systems Programming Language:

• Effective use of its data structures and its stream-oriented structure takes some adjustment for C programmers, but the results can be quite striking.

According to Ramesh Natarajan:

• AWK is a superb language for testing algorithms and applications with some complexity, especially where the problem can be broken into chunks which can streamed as part of a pipe. It's an ideal tool for augmenting the features of shell programming as it is ubiquitous; found in some form on almost all Unix/Linux/BSD systems. Many problems dealing with text, log lines or symbol tables are handily solved or at the very least prototyped with awk along with the other tools found on Unix/Linux systems.

From the NoSQL pages:

• (Other languages like Perl is) a good programming language for writing self-contained programs, but pre-compilation and long start-up time are worth paying only if once the program has loaded it can do everything in one go. This contrasts sharply with the Operator-stream Paradigm, where operators are chained together in pipelines of two, three or more programs. The overhead associated with initializing (say) Perl at every stage of the pipeline makes pipelining inefficient. A better way of manipulating structured ASCII files is to use the AWK programming language, which is much smaller, more specialized for this task, and is very fast at startup.