Simon Michael

Found in awk-pta's README, this great interview with Prof. Alfred Aho about the origins of AWK: https://a-z.readthedocs.io/en/latest/awk.html

"it was born from the necessity to meet a need. As a researcher at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, I found myself keeping track of budgets..."

"Some Wall Street financial houses used AWK when it first came out to balance their books because it was so easy to write data-processing programs in AWK..."

Plot twist ! Is AWK the original #plaintextaccounting tool ??

#awk #gawk

The A-Z of Programming Languages: AWK — A-Z 0.01 documentation

Nov 13 at 9:49pmWeb
Show threadSimon MichaelNov 13

"Interestingly, we did not intend the language to be used except by the three of us."

"AWK turned a number of people into programmers because the learning curve for the language was very shallow."

"One Monday morning I walked into my office to find a person from the Bell Labs micro-electronics product division who had used AWK to create a multi-thousand-line computer-aided design system."

/me reassigns gawk from "legacy unix wizards tool" to "contemporary light programming tool"

Show threadTim ChaseNov 14
@simonmic while I see you quite a bit on r/plaintextaccounting, r/awk is a pretty friendly place too…consider this a personal invitation to come have fun 😀
Show threadSimon MichaelNov 14
@gumnos TIL - thanks!
Show threadCaleb MaclennanNov 15
@simonmic Speaking of AWK, I need to submit an updated version of my posting merge and sort tool...
Show threadTim ChaseNov 13
@simonmic other than floating-point math hiccups (that modern PTA uses a Decimal-type for), it's how I kept track of my finances too before discovering #plaintextaccounting so that doesn't surprise me at all ☺
Show threadSimon MichaelNov 13

@gumnos 👍🏻

Also: "We were heavily influenced by GREP, a popular string-matching utility on UNIX, which had been created in our research center... We thought that we’d like to generalize the class of patterns to deal with numbers as well as strings."