I found the best anagram in English (2017) (blog.plover.com)

I tried to avoid modern awk features, like asort, to be something that would have worked in the 1980s:

  {
      # Convert to normal form:
      #  1. Fold to lower case
      #  2. Bin the letters to get frequency counts
      #  3. Only consider lower case ASCII letters
      split(tolower($0), letters, "");
  
      # Ignore asort() in modern awks and do a bin sort instead.
      for (i in letters) {
          c = letters[i];
          repeats[c] = repeats[c] c;
      }
  
      normal_form = "";
      for (i=97; i<=122; i++) {
          c = sprintf("%c", i); # no chr() in a 1980s awk
          normal_form = normal_form repeats[c];
      }
  
      table[normal_form] = table[normal_form] "," $0
      delete repeats;
  }
  END {
      # Only show the ones with at least 5 matches
      for (i in table) {
          match_str = table[i];
          split(match_str, matches, ",");
          num_matches = length(matches)-1
          if (num_matches >= 5) {
              # print the number of matches, then the match string
              printf("%d%s\n", num_matches, match_str);
          }
      }
  }

  % awk -f anagram.awk < words_alpha.txt | sort -n -t, | tail -5
  13,elaps,lapse,leaps,lepas,pales,peals,pleas,salep,saple,sepal,slape,spale,speal
  14,anestri,antsier,asterin,eranist,nastier,ratines,resiant,restain,retains,retinas,retsina,stainer,starnie,stearin
  14,apers,apres,asper,pares,parse,pears,prase,presa,rapes,reaps,repas,spaer,spare,spear
  14,arest,aster,astre,rates,reast,resat,serta,stare,strae,tares,tarse,tears,teras,treas
  15,alerts,alters,artels,estral,laster,lastre,rastle,ratels,relast,resalt,salter,slater,staler,stelar,talers

But, "painful"? No. Not to someone who knew how to use awk.

Given the tone of the rest of the article I assumed that I'd either read something into it that wasn't there or was missing some context - for example, perhaps the person on SO had insisted that this was the correct approach, and you'd gone to some lengths to show that it was not and were exasperated by it by the time you wrote the article.

At any rate - it didn't really take away from your article for me, but I did see it as condescending.