Or if you know you can achieve some tasks with one of these tools, you might suddenly realize more tasks than you imagined might be solved with them.

Do you consider learning a tool you won't use a waste of time?

IMHO knowing what kinds of tools exist and how they are used for different tasks is enormously useful. Most software projects require me to create a set of tools to solve problems in a certain space efficiently. In any long-living non-trivial project there will be feature requests you couldn't have anticipated in the beginning. They tend to be painful if your program is just a bunch of features hacked together. But if you take a tools-first approach, the unexpected features can often be solved with what you have.

Of course, time is limited and you can't learn everything. But learning one of every different kind of tool is a very good use of time.

EDIT: Note that I'm not claiming you'll build a web app with awk. I'm saying you might write code that can be used similarly to awk in some abstract sense, and that might be a core part of a web app.

Even if you do, it's a better investment to learn a general high level language with strong scripting capabilities, but that is also good at many things else.

Sure, the days you'll need awk, you'll take 15 minutes instead of 2 writing your script. So what ?

But the rest of the year, you'll have a more versatile toolbox at your disposal for automatic things, testing, prototype network processes, make quick web sites or API, and explore data sets.

That being said, I can see the point of learning awk because, well, it's fun.

> Even if you do, it's a better investment to learn a general high level language with strong scripting capabilities, but that is also good at many things else.

And we already have that: it's called perl. :)

I tried very hard not to name a specific language so that the point is not cancelled by some lang war.