The point is that the people who do use such tools tend to have a derisive attitude towards those who don't, and that the derisiveness is completely unwarranted.

It's very likely that those people know both python and awk, and this their attitude of superiority is not unwarranted.

It's much faster to type out the awk line then to write the same in python.

> It's very likely that those people know both python and awk, and this their attitude of superiority is not unwarranted.

Ok....

> It's much faster to type out the awk line then to write the same in python.

Is there some sort of speed-typing award that's being handed out that I'm missing? If there isn't, why would they feel superior?

We're all† smug pricks, but that's no cause for celebration. And 99% of the time we're not even justified in our smugness.

† All = a huge chunk of IT people, developers especially.

And what if instead of "stop using your preferred tool" the person says "there's this other tool I use and I find it makes these sorts of tasks easier; You might like it, too."

That's different, and obviously not a case of the "derisive attitude" I pointed out. Just because you don't do it, doesn't mean people don't do it.

To me, this sounds like coming up with an ad hominem argument to rationalize not learning something that one finds different and challenging. For the record, I do not know awk, but that's because I just haven't taken the time to learn it yet, not because I (ironically) believe it's only for people who think they're better than me.

Perhaps what I am trying to say is

One-off one liners dashed off without syntax errors speaks of long and deep usage of a command line tool. That's cool. But continuing to use those one liners worries me for reasons not to do with skill

I would worry about the manual versus automation being used here. I can think of many cases where a sed/awk solution will work really well - but they almost always will be part of a larger developed and supported pipeline.

But if you using the one liner for anything not trivial you are still doing too much manual work

trying to be even shorter - if awk is your tool great! But ... at some point (and that point is much closer today than previously) anything we do needs a suite of tools we have hacked together and rewritten and passed around - from log file analysis to whatever.

And while awk can absolutely play a role in those tools, I doubt very much that anyone is good enough to make the one liners on the fly.

An quick example might be "show me all the logs for the request sent by user X in the last five minutes off the front web servers but ignore the heartbeat from that app marketing put out and ..."

I want that in my path, alongside everything else I and others working on the systems think useful.

Yes hack together your tools with any language you like. Put them in a seperate repo with all the linting turned off

But don't try and one liner them from scratch.

I agree. My perception is that tools like awk are best used for one-off tasks, whereas anything part of a greater pipeline should be written in a more readable/maintainable language.

I was just pushing back against the sentiment that awk is undesirable because of attitutes that its users may have, which I don't think you were expressing :)

No? As I said elsewhere, I know and use Awk. I just don't have an attitude about it.

>The point is that the people who do use such tools tend to have a derisive attitude towards those who don't,

This has not been my experience.