6.13. Programming by Example

You mentioned that AWK is a language that lives because of programming by example.

Peter: That was a deliberate design decision. There's many things; some of them bad, some of them good. AWK has a collection of interesting—which is a very polite way of describing it—syntactic choices, of which I think only a couple are real mistakes. Mostly the idea was it would look a lot like C because then we wouldn't have to explain it to the people we worked with.