The Unreasonable Effectiveness of AWK

I&#x27;ve done a lot of prototyping with AWK, and as with all good prototypes, a lot of them lingered in production for years without so much as a glitch.<p>I also did the entire 2020 AoC in mainly AWK, with some help of the shell at large at points.<p>I don&#x27;t really have a point to make other than showing my appreciation of this quirky tool.

I realize the author was probably using the term &quot;unreasonable&quot; for literary effect.<p>But it&#x27;s not unreasonable at all. <i>A</i>ho of the &quot;Dragon Book&quot;, <i>W</i>einberger of Bell Labs, and of course Brian <i>K</i>ernighan of K&amp;R.<p>One would expect nothing less, really and they did not disappoint.

Stephen Ramsey is an interesting geek! &quot;[A]n Associate Professor of English and a Fellow at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities&quot;. He&#x27;s an English major all the way to PhD. The title of one of his books proved sufficiently tantalizing to motivate a search:<p><i>Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism</i>, 2011:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dansinykin.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;8&#x2F;4&#x2F;0&#x2F;2&#x2F;84026824&#x2F;ramsay_algorithmic_criticism.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dansinykin.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;8&#x2F;4&#x2F;0&#x2F;2&#x2F;84026824&#x2F;ramsay_al...</a>

<p><pre><code> We’re not creating file handles and opening files (or closing them) </code></pre> In the past I&#x27;ve had to write awk scripts that explicitly close files since it&#x27;s quite easy to run out of file descriptors&#x2F;reach an awk imposed limit.