Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderBack in the 90s when I got my first job, Awk was the gateway drug to the stronger stuff, Perl. Once you were hooked, productivity skyrocketed and managers would wonder around the office saying "how does he do that 10-day thing in just 10 minutes?" Those were the days when dynamic languages were game changers in the Unix landscape. But, in fact, the mainframe folks and the PC crowd had had Rexx and BASIC for at least a decade prior…
I feel like I might hold the record for the most absurd AWK success story, which I hope to write up some day. I wrote the front-end for what became my highest-traffic website (RhymeZone.com) in AWK back in 1996, and it ran for 27 years with just occasional feature additions every few years, serving up to 2 million pages a day from a single medium-size EC2 instance at its peak. Even in 1996 it seemed like a bad idea to…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 333
- Total comments
- 94
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020-02-11 | Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)First breakout · Best thread | kick | 215 | 80 |
| 2023-01-19 | Awk as a Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited | goranmoomin | 2 | 0 |
| 2024-03-29 | Awk as a major systems programming language, revisited (2018)Latest 20+ point return | goranmoomin | 116 | 14 |