What are you most proud of in the development of AWK?

AWK was developed by three people: me, Brian Kernighan and Peter Weinberger. Peter Weinberger was interested in what Brian and I were doing right from the start. We had created a grammatical specification for AWK but hadn't yet created the full run-time environment. Weinberger came along and said 'hey, this looks like a language I could use myself', and within a week he created a working run time for AWK. This initial form of AWK was very useful for writing the data processing routines that we were all interested in but more importantly it provided an evolvable platform for the language.

One of the most interesting parts of this project for me was that I got to know how Kernighan and Weinberger thought about language design: it was a really enlightening process! With the flexible compiler construction tools we had at our disposal, we very quickly evolved the language to adopt new useful syntactic and semantic constructs. We spent a whole year intensely debating what constructs should and shouldn't be in the language.

Language design is a very personal activity and each person brings to a language the classes of problems that they'd like to solve, and the manner in which they'd like them to be solved. I had a lot of fun creating AWK, and working with Kernighan and Weinberger was one of the most stimulating experiences of my career. I also learned I would not want to get into a programming contest with either of them however! Their programming abilities are formidable.

Interestingly, we did not intend the language to be used except by the three of us. But very quickly we discovered lots of other people had the need for the routine kind of data processing that AWK was good for. People didn't want to write hundred-line C programs to do data processing that could be done with a few lines of AWK, so lots of people started using AWK.

For many years AWK was one of the most popular commands on UNIX, and today, even though a number of other similar languages have come on the scene, AWK still ranks among the top 25 or 30 most popular programming languages in the world. And it all began as a little exercise to create a utility that the three of us would find useful for our own use.

How do you feel about AWK being so popular?

I am very happy that other people have found AWK useful. And not only did AWK attract a lot of users, other language designers later used it as a model for developing more powerful languages.

About 10 years after AWK was created, Larry Wall created a language called Perl, which was patterned after AWK and some other UNIX commands. Perl is now one of the most popular programming language in the world.. So not only was AWK popular when it was introduced but it also stimulated the creation of other popular languages.

AWK has inspired many other languages as you've already mentioned: why do you think this is?

What made AWK popular initially was its simplicity and the kinds of tasks it was built to do. It has a very simple programming model. The idea of pattern-action programming is very natural for people. We also made the language compatible with pipes in UNIX. The actions in AWK are really simple forms of C programs. You can write a simple action like {print $2} or you can write a much more complex C-like program as an action associated with a pattern. Some Wall Street financial houses used AWK when it first came out to balance their books because it was so easy to write data-processing programs in AWK.

AWK turned a number of people into programmers because the learning curve for the language was very shallow. Even today a large number of people continue to use AWK, saying languages such as Perl have become too complicated. Some say Perl has become such a complex language that it's become almost impossible to understand the programs once they've been written.

Another advantage of AWK is that that the language is stable. We haven't changed it since the mid 1980's. And there are also lots of other people who've implemented versions of AWK on different platforms such as Windows.