I can't imagine what one would do with thousands of lines of awk, so that seems a little extreme.
Awk is a pretty terse language, and that gives you plenty of room to put in whitespace and comments and still have something short and sweet. I think that the idea of writing code to be nicely readable by your collaborators, or your future self, might not have been around in the early days of UNIX.
("But it's just a one-off thing I'm never going to do again, why should I save it to a file?", you may ask. Is what you do important? Then you'll probably have to do something like it again.)
Awk is a pretty terse language, and that gives you plenty of room to put in whitespace and comments and still have something short and sweet. I think that the idea of writing code to be nicely readable by your collaborators, or your future self, might not have been around in the early days of UNIX.
("But it's just a one-off thing I'm never going to do again, why should I save it to a file?", you may ask. Is what you do important? Then you'll probably have to do something like it again.)