A couple decades ago I remember somebody using awk in programming competitions, as a stunt, and doing surprisingly well. For tasks involving text processing it has a huge advantage, and it ends up doing ok with other stuff.
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Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now.
But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better.
But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl.
And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.
awk '{ print $2 }' foo.txt
perl -lane 'print $F[1]' foo.txt