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   JohnMashey (johnmashey@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 20-Apr-2025 14:15:34 JST JohnMashey

   in reply to

   • Paolo Amoroso

   @amoroso
   2 of 4/After CRAS was running in telco, I printed the shell scripts/awk code, left a copy on Brian's desk, at that time the largest collection of awk in production use. He was surprised, said "We built awk for little programs!" I Said: "It works, it was fast to write, easy to change." And later, I had someone write C functiosnthat made it easy to recode performance-sensitive cases in C.
   A bit later, A, W & K invited me over to give input on features for a revised implementation.

   • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     JohnMashey (johnmashey@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 20-Apr-2025 14:15:35 JST JohnMashey

     in reply to

     • Paolo Amoroso

     @amoroso
     1 of 4/ Cable Repair Adminstrative System(CRAS) was Bell Labs software built late 1970s for telcos:
     https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.1538-7305.1982.tb04342.x (sorry paywall),
     From that paper:
     Lines of code
     16K PL/I (part on IBM mainframe, rest on UNIX)
     10K C
     15K Shell (mostly awk, for data transforms & reports)
     6K Misc
     33K documentation
     This was done to move fast, adapt to real needs in the field(1st Field Trial Boston, 2nd in Southwest Bell, who told us on 1st meeting they did things different than Yankees.)

   • Embed this notice
     Paolo Amoroso (amoroso@fosstodon.org)'s status on Sunday, 20-Apr-2025 14:15:36 JST Paolo Amoroso

     This post nicely captures why AWK is such a delightful and effective little language:

     "A minimum of features liberates creativity. When there is only one way to do something, you don’t spend a lot of time choosing that very way."

     https://maximullaris.com/awk.html

     #awk #linux