Except that in awk the middle-ground between "could be trivially done without awk" and "illegible" is extremely narrow.
When I 'grep awk /usr/bin/*' then I see only two types of usages.
Most commonly it's used in place of grep, sed or cut for no obvious reason. Gladly less common but all the more annoying is when someone tries to go all "fancy" with it...
Awk has everything "real" languages have. The same math, flow control and data structures. It also has a subset of string mangling ops that give it the "illegible" appearance. But it is fine as a general purpose dynamic scripting language. As an example:
It could be clearer without the variable-name golfing and as a seperate .awk file (instead of a CLI one-liner) but it reads pretty much the same as C without any pesky type declarations.
