My thoughts exactly. What about a pre-poll poll to determine which languages should make into the final poll? sed and PostScript really should have made the list.

But I'm really surprised awk didn't make it in there. It disturbs me a bit that I was stuck voting for C++. I know I'm not the only person who got sucked into perl after pushing awk beyond the limits of what it was originally intended to do. sigh

Yep. I voted for "other" simply because awk wasn't there. I used awk on unix and DOS (yay Thomson Toolkit), and found myself writing awk scripts that wrote their own batch files and then called those batch files to continue the processing. Ah, the good old days. It was indeed outgrowing awk's limits that led me to Perl.

These days I still find myself using awk for one-liners, because it's more compact for saying things like '{print $4}' that the corresponding Perl code.

Awk really was a godsend after having dealt with only grep and sed. I no longer remember any sed, and that's a Good Thing.


print@_{sort keys %_},$/if%_=split//,'= & *a?b:e\f/h^h!j+n,o@o;r$s-t%t#u'

These days I still find myself using awk for one-liners

A few months ago I was going to post a golf competition based on the one-liners at the beginning of The Awk Programming Language. A sort of awk versus Perl.

However, when I tried it myself I couldn't out-golf any of the awk solutions.

I am very fond of awk. It stirs emotions in me like memories of an old sweetheart.

--
John.

Hmmm.... seems to me that the solution lies in instant runoff voting, as neatly explained here, by the muppets.

I'll just go and post a Discussion about it...

Andy.

PS: Joke