awk

Raised as a usability problem by 20 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2011–2024), in 20 threads.

People raised many different problems with awk, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 20 complaints

Setting OFS does nothing unless fields are modified, which is unintuitive2024-10-06
Awk one-liner is too complicated and opaque to read without the manual2023-08-20
Awk syntax is cumbersome, so every non-trivial use means searching for the invocation2022-10-27
Awk syntax is hard to learn and feels arcane2022-04-26
Awk's syntax is terrible and impossible to remember2022-04-13
Awk's syntax and semantics feel terrible and awkward to work with2021-11-12
Awk programs are hard to read, per a reputation noted in the thread2021-09-30
Has to look up syntax again each time, since awk idioms are hard to memorize2021-09-07
Awkward unintuitive syntax means re-learning it every time for occasional use2020-06-07
Handling escaping of quotes, spaces and line feeds is error-prone and hard to get right2020-05-20
Hard to remember how to print multiple fields, and the '{print $1}' syntax is cumbersome to type2020-02-12
Word-boundary regex like \bfoo\b silently matches nothing, with no clear way to find the right syntax2020-01-21
Comparison operators behave inconsistently across awk versions, so results and syntax errors vary2018-06-15
Commenter finds the language confusing and says it was designed for an older environment2018-05-24
Hard to learn awk; can't find examples that make it understandable2017-07-04
Hidden features are hard to discover behind an impenetrable teletype-style interface2016-12-21
Terrible syntax and unreadable hacks make it hard to use2016-07-03
Awk and sed look like line noise at first2016-01-30
Awk is very confusing for the commenter to use2015-03-13
Irregular syntax means having to consult the manual for simple things2011-11-05