I sorta, kinda agree. Tools written in AWK (and friends) are indeed somewhat unmaintainable, but they're really close to being just right for a LOT of applications. The vnlog toolkit (https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog) adds just a little bit of syntactic sugar to the usual commandline tools to make processing scripts robust and easy to read and write. This was not my intent initially, but I now do most of my data processing with the shell and vnl-wrapped awk (and sort and join, ...) It's really nice. If you write stuff in awk, you should check it out. (Disclaimer: I'm the author)