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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

Nah I feel the same way for Awk.

> It’s sad to see this happen to such a revolutionary-for-its-time language.

Revolutionary? Please. It was certainly a decent-for-its-time language. I used it a lot! 25 years ago. Why on earth would you use it today though? We have so many better options. Even Python is better at this point.

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If it allows you to be productive and fits the way you think, why not use it? And what is your metric for "being better"?

Languages don't really exist in isolation, especially general purpose languages. They depend on community for things like libraries, support, compiler & tooling development, etc.

You can use a dead language if you want, but you're going to lose out on all of that. And you'd better not ever want anyone to help you with your projects...

AWK is Posix. Python is not. End of the story. POSIX awk will run everywhere, and GAWK has networking capabilities.

That's a very naive take. Posix is not the holy scripture. And have you heard of this OS called "Windows"? It's pretty popular.

In servers, IOT, embedded... Windows doesn't exist.

Personally, I find Perl’s modern object modules interesting and fun. And I’ve always liked the fact that many Perl built ins were based on POSIX, which doesn’t seem common in other languages.

>Revolutionary? Please.

name another language that did what perl did in its salad days, especially wrt being a super-shell unix scripting language

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