And when one is using awk/sed that script is often invoked from a shell, bash for instance. And since the awk/sed can't hold its own as a general purpose programming language, now I am writing bash code, a personal sin.
Awk/sed made sense for the time and place they are from, but things have changed.
Don't do that. Do not assume something is of no use because you don't know how to use it. Double that recommendation for tools that have widespread use. There is a reason they're used everywhere.
In the case of awk/sed/perl: Nothing beats them for composition in one-liner text processing pipelines.
Don't assume I don't know how to use it. :)
One line verses ten, I'll take the more readable thing over the APL.
Can't find links now, but fairly certain were stories in past about how switching to AWK from other tools increased performance
Okay, acknowledged. Python and Ruby are superior in every regard. Would you mind letting us chat about sed and awk now for a minute?
"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
Also.. I use Awk every day, for all kinds of things. I forget the order of parameters in split, sub etc, which takes a few seconds to look up with man awk. I got into sed a while ago but never use it. Awk, together with sort and uniq sometimes, is all I need.
And it is interactive. You have an input. Print that out and look what needs to be done. Write the first transforming step in Awk. See what that did. Add the next step. See what that did. Extremely interactive. After a few minutes I have a one-liner (often 2 or 3 wrapped lines) that does exactly what I want, and easy to adapt to other similar things. I have very large bash history enabled so they stay Ctrl-R-accessible.
I thought my comment might land ok, which due to a lack of response might have. It explained educated and <funny joke>
I might have typed the same thing in a different time.
*edit, it would be fun to have a forum board that allowed for out of band semantic information so … being cut off
A couple bits that do correspond to 'the flamewar style', though, are when users start telling each other to "chill a bit"; and when people start arguing about "moving the goal posts and putting words in my mouth". It's a reliable sign of bad internet discussion when people start arguing about they are or aren't saying (rather than talking about whatever the ostensible subject was).
(I might be wrong about "everything" but that's what bomb-tossing is all about)
Great way to have confidence in a port and provide for a fallback path. Eventually the new code will take over the old code and the old code will wither and die.
I think the problem is that they fall into an uncanny valley between "simple tool" and "verbose programming language"; they are really terse languages wearing a simple tool's sheepskin.