

Don’t Mawk Awk (2009) - bsg75
http://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and-most-elegant-big-data-munging-language/

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gruseom
Why have we discovered so few local optima outside of general-purpose
programming? There are important classes of problems that don't require the
full complexity of a general language. It can be much simpler to solve those
in a limited language, and that gives the programmer more power. Limited
languages also give implementers more power, since they can exploit invariants
that hold for programs written in that language, that are not true of programs
written in general languages, to gain efficiency wins. This is why the author
is able to say that Mawk "wins on both LOC and performance criteria — a rare
feat indeed, transcending the usual competition of slow-but-easy scripting
languages versus fast-but-hard compiled languages". The fact that that kind of
win-win can't be had in general-purpose languages seems like a strong
incentive to pursue more specialized ones.

I wonder how many subspaces there are that are small enough to be exploitable
in this way yet large enough to address valuable classes of problems. It feels
like we should have more of these.

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ibotty
that's a good article. small tools that do one thing well can also be
optimized pretty nicely. unix is a nice philosophy indeed.

