I use awk constantly in bioinformatics, for many of the file formats designed to store genomic data, awk is the easiest tool you can use for processing.
Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
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Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#32awk is great for data analysis - usually, I start with cut, then move to awk as complexity increases and finally to python.
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#33i no longer use it but Perl was always the better solution when one thought AWK was the answer. Perl will do those things where AWK really shines and if the problem got bigger, Perl was easier to deal with.
The problem is that awk is a very simple language, which you can learn in an afternoon. Perl is a very complex language, and is not used anymore, so you're just spending your time on something you'll rarely use.
The part that's equivalent to what you'd use for your regular awk isn't very different. Sure, you can do full-scale OO programs, but that doesn't have a large impact on small string munging. I get that you might not learn it to fluff up your CV.
Also, it's usually the same kind of Perl, so you don't have to worry about whether awk is the "one true" one, or mawk, or gawk...
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#34I've used Python almost my entire career, but started with out the UNIX tools. I never found awk interesting, then took a peek at it recently and understood: this was the pre-perl! it had scripting-language hash tables!
PERL was originally advertised as a replacement for “awk and sed”
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#35I've used Python almost my entire career, but started with out the UNIX tools. I never found awk interesting, then took a peek at it recently and understood: this was the pre-perl! it had scripting-language hash tables!
PERL was originally advertised as a replacement for “awk and sed”
yep- and I went straight to perl after learning sed, and ignoring awk. awk looked even weirder than perl (I wasn't a big fan of the pattern matching style). In retrospect, I think awk is a massively underappreciated (for its time and context). I can't say I'd want to work with it regularly (same for perl; in the long run, I prefer variants of C style).
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#36i no longer use it but Perl was always the better solution when one thought AWK was the answer. Perl will do those things where AWK really shines and if the problem got bigger, Perl was easier to deal with.
Perl was built initially as a sed/awk killer but got distracted into trying to take over the world. The interpreter for a language with 100x the number of features will always be slower. Also there's a very clear boundary for when I should use awk by itself, as part of a pipeline, or switch to a better tool. I feel like Perl has the potential to suck me imperceptibly into a huge mess where I spend 80% of my time refactoring everything.
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#37"A good programmer uses the most powerful tool to do a job. A great programmer uses the least powerful tool that does the job." I believe this, and I always try to find the combination of simple and lightweight tools which does the job at hand correctly. Awk sometimes proves surprisingly powerful. Just look at the concision of this awk one liner doing a fairly complex job: zcat large.log.gz | awk '{print $0 | "gzip -…
Ehh. Until the 'job' gets extended and then your simple tool makes it exponentially more complex and you have to rewrite it with the more powerful tool.
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#38"A good programmer uses the most powerful tool to do a job. A great programmer uses the least powerful tool that does the job." I believe this, and I always try to find the combination of simple and lightweight tools which does the job at hand correctly. Awk sometimes proves surprisingly powerful. Just look at the concision of this awk one liner doing a fairly complex job: zcat large.log.gz | awk '{print $0 | "gzip -…
Ehh. Until the 'job' gets extended and then your simple tool makes it exponentially more complex and you have to rewrite it with the more powerful tool.
Choosing a "good enough for the medium term with minimal effort now" is a winner in my book, even if it's likely to be rewritten in the long term.
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#39i no longer use it but Perl was always the better solution when one thought AWK was the answer. Perl will do those things where AWK really shines and if the problem got bigger, Perl was easier to deal with.
The problem is that awk is a very simple language, which you can learn in an afternoon. Perl is a very complex language, and is not used anymore, so you're just spending your time on something you'll rarely use.
Perl is very must still used. lol
Re: Awk: The Power and Promise of a 40-Year-Old Language
#40i no longer use it but Perl was always the better solution when one thought AWK was the answer. Perl will do those things where AWK really shines and if the problem got bigger, Perl was easier to deal with.
The problem is that awk is a very simple language, which you can learn in an afternoon. Perl is a very complex language, and is not used anymore, so you're just spending your time on something you'll rarely use.
>> Perl is a very complex language, and is not used anymore, so you're just spending your time on something you'll rarely use.
Perl is no more complex than Python, Ruby, or Powershell. If you use any of those you can be productive with Perl in a few hours.
Perl is still used, it is just not as popular as it was in the past. Do you use Git? Parts of it are written in perl. Large parts of Git were originally written in Perl, but have been migrated to C over time.