I worked with Dr. Loui for a year-uh on research projects after loving his undergrad AI class. He's crazy -- like "A demo to the customer is not working? Let's edit that in real time then reload, proving why scripting languages are better." -- but he's a very useful kind of crazy.
I think that Ruby/Python are the spiritual descendants to this argument in 2013, by the way. e.g. A class project was to scrape eBay and predict the winnin bids on a variety of item classes. (Spoiler: "the current bid" outperforms most algorithms.). With AWK, you scrape the HTML and do some ugly parsing. Of course, with Ruby you'd hpricot a single CSS selector and have the lab 80% complete in ~3 lines.
The single greatest disadvantage to using AWK for serious work is that nobody but you and Dr. Loui does that so you get to invent everything for yourself every time. (You probably do not appreciate how much your language ecosystem bakes in code re-use until you've used a language that assumes essentially all use is one-off, by the way.)
I think that Ruby/Python are the spiritual descendants to this argument in 2013, by the way. e.g. A class project was to scrape eBay and predict the winnin bids on a variety of item classes. (Spoiler: "the current bid" outperforms most algorithms.). With AWK, you scrape the HTML and do some ugly parsing. Of course, with Ruby you'd hpricot a single CSS selector and have the lab 80% complete in ~3 lines.
The single greatest disadvantage to using AWK for serious work is that nobody but you and Dr. Loui does that so you get to invent everything for yourself every time. (You probably do not appreciate how much your language ecosystem bakes in code re-use until you've used a language that assumes essentially all use is one-off, by the way.)