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Comment by u678u | Hacker News Reader

Its amazing to me that despite our enormously powerful PCs and wonderful modern software tools we still rely on foundations built in a different time tty, awk, even bash scripts.

Half the time its great to work with such finely tuned Darwinian survivors, the other half I want to start again. Doing helm k8s yaml templates makes me wonder if its possible for us to write something simple and clean that could replace those old building blocks.

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I won't defend TTY or bash, but I will say that awk has stood the test of time because it's an amazingly potent tool for doing ad-hoc processing of textual information, which is still a frequent task even in the era of Kubernetes and yaml templates. Why does it need replacing?

When I learned awk I felt like I unlocked a superpower.

Yeah: it's like, the problem we are trying to solve largely hasn't changed, so the solutions are maybe a bit lacking in elegance sometimes, but they are generally fine... and the concern would be that someone trying to do it today would be like "the correct way to do this is to have some ridiculously complex stack built on top of 70 pseudo-standards from Google with a single bespoke implementation in JavaScript that no one could ever reimplement".

Windows 10 is still using the CP/M unit labeling scheme.

I definitely found jq to be my modern addition to the pantheon alongside awk, sed, and grep.

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