I forget where I read it but Brian Kernighan said, at some point, the lack of namespaces in original Awk was probably the biggest mistake that prevented bigger adoption in large projects. Now that we have it, I'm hoping to see a brilliant IDE surface in the near future.
I read the book written by the creators and it's pretty clear they never intended it to be a general purpose language lol. I'm paraphrasing but they basically wrote in the book "People are completely mad and are intent on using our DSL as a general programming language so we added half baked functions to it but it's bad and you should feel bad"
