Note: You can do many of these one-liners using tools that understand Python: Xonsh or Pyp. You won't need to learn Awk -- let alone any non-standard dialect of Awk. It won't be as fast as some Awk implementations (maybe), but you'll have a gentle on-ramp and off-ramp to a more featureful programming language.
I think the problem with DSLs is when a problem only partially fits into what they can do.
I would kindly disagree here.
I myself been dedidacted Python lover in past for many years now came to a conclusion that what can be scripted with AWK, should be scripted in AWK (over Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.). I'm not saying that you should write big apps though, but for small scripts AWK is absolutely fine alternative to major scripting languages with lots of benefits. Been universally available (as part of POSIX) and very compliant (language standard is almost unchanged for over 30 years now). As they say: "Good programmer chooses the most powerful tool for the job, best programmer chooses the least powerful tool for the job". Also see [1].
There is absolutely nothing wrong in learning AWK. It's very small language you can grasp fully in hours or days, and be sure you know it all, since it's very unlikely it chanages any time soon. Besides the classical book [2] by A., W., K. is absolute pleasure to read. Amazing, but it's still totally relevant, despite been published in 1988.
Shameless plug. I'm the author of a task/command runner [3] implemented almost 100% in AWK and I still think this was perfect choice of a language for this project.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power
[2] https://archive.org/download/pdfy-MgN0H1joIoDVoIC7/The_AWK_P...
> As they say: "Good programmer chooses the most powerful tool for the job, best programmer chooses the least powerful tool for the job". Also see [1].
I don't agree with this. For a network protocol, sure. But not for what Awk does.
Tim Berners Lee's argument (in the Wikipedia page) does not apply to Awk.
> Been universally available (as part of POSIX) and very compliant (language standard is almost unchanged for over 30 years now).
There's tons of incompatible dialects. I think that shows the problem with what you're saying.
To my knowledge the major dialects in use are:
- One True Awk (aka bwk) (https://github.com/onetrueawk/awk) - this one is bundled in all *BSD/macOS
- Gawk (https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/) - this one is bundled in most Linux
- mawk (https://invisible-island.net/mawk/) - bundled in some Linux distros (?), known as the fastest byte-code compiled implementation.
All three have very good compatibility, but Gawk is super-set over POSIX standard. I have some evidence here, since I regularly test [1] against these implementations and even some others, like GoAWK.
[1] https://github.com/xonixx/makesure/actions/runs/1830978431