greynode

I just thought I’d share with you Random thoughts on scripting languages by Brian Kernighan.

After reading this, I looked up the source code to the unix utility wc. The GNU wc program was written in C, and amounted to about 800 lines with comments. A similar program written in awk is a mere 2 lines long:

{ nc += length($0) + 1; nw += NF }
END { print NR, "lines", nw, "words", nc, "characters" }

I know you are probably thinking that I just made an unfair comparison. Yes, I did.