> Very few people still code with the legacies of the 1970s: ML, Pascal, Scheme, Smalltalk.<p>Arguably, the software world would be better off if more people <i>did</i> code with those 1970s languages, than with the ones we are stuck with now.<p>And that applies to Awk, too. As the author quotes Neil Ormos stating, Awk is well suited for <i>personal computing</i>, something which we have gotten further and further from at the same time as computers have become more distributed. At what point in history have such a large fraction of the human race had the ability to calculate to such an amazing order of magnitude, and at what point in history have such a large fraction of the same human race not bothered with calculation?<p>Awk is a great tool precisely because it puts quite a lot of expressive power in the hands of an average user on a Unix system. Sure, on a Lisp machine or Smalltalk machine there really isn't the same need for Awk: the systems languages on such machines are safe enough and expressive enough to do what Awk does. But in the Unix context — which is basically what we're all living in, with even the VMS-derived Windows more-or-less adhering to the Unix model — Awk is a godsend.<p>edit: correct typo