Who cares about the date. AWK is old as heck, and with The C Programming Language 2e over "The Unix Programming Environment" (Overriding pre ANSI-C) you can do magic with very few resources.

Oh, you need to understand the underlying maths well in order to code your functions right? That's the biggest issue in data science management. Too much relying on specialized " biggies" like Numpy/CUDA with atrocious codebases where the calculations lasts months compared to a 1 hour chore with C or even Perl with Gnuplot.

Could you give examples of these atrocious code bases and programs that are as slow as you say.