Recently, I was helping out a friend in analyzing some RNA samples for her work. These samples are huge - like nearly a gigabyte of data. There was this tool which was recommended for the job - mirexpress. It was a small job, perhaps 10 minutes worth of effort. To make my work easier, I provisioned a beefy (and costly) machine on Azure to do the job, took a quick look at the clock (it said 11 PM), ran the tool, and relaxed. The tool crashed while reading the file.

In an attempt to fix the bug, I opened mirexpress's code. And all my confidence in my programming ability vanished when I saw its innards. I understand that the code may have been written by scientists who had no experience in programming, but I have never been so utterly _disoriented_ by bad code. Anyways, after hacking away at the mess for about 3-4 hours, I realized that this was a fool's errand and thought I'll just phone it in the next day saying I couldn't do it. I went to sleep thinking that it was already late and I'd get late for work the next day.

- 5 minutes later -

I woke up with a start, recalling this nifty tool called awk. I had last used it maybe 3 years ago, and before that only in college. But I could see how awk could do some of the things which mirexpress was claiming to do. So I fire up my computer, write an awk script - 2 lines only! TWO FUCKING LINES! And it runs like a charm - eats away at megabytes of sample data and gives me results I can show. So then like any rational person, I spent the remaining hours re-discovering awk and forgot to sleep. Pissed away the whole next day (and some part of the day after that too!) :-D

It's really fascinating that this nifty little tools invented DECADES ago are still going strong, and there's been no _evolutionary_ leap in areas where tools like awk/grep/sed excel at.