@pinskia @navi @dalias @ska I write a lot of Awk. It's very good for text processing. It's also much, much faster than Python.

I once had large CSV files I had to process. They got updated regularly and were about 2GiB. I wrote the processor in Python and it worked, but took a while to run. It wasn't a long time, but it was something you could pull out that XKCD comic about compiling for.

The CSV was regular enough that Awk would work. So I rewrote it in Awk and a shell pipeline. The result? It was about 10x faster. It made basically everything about working with it easier.

That was back in 2014. Even today I will start something in Python, realize Awk works just as well and switch. And I have done some rewrites of small tools for myself and the speed difference is still there.

And I've even done binary file handling with GNU Awk. I used it to process GOFF files on IBM mainframes. It was much easier than anything else.

@rygorous @aeva "I deeply care both about understanding what I am doing, and about being understood."

This describes my life very succinctly. So you're not alone.