When I was in middle school, a friend and I had an internship with a physicist who wanted us to write some software to perform a simple transformation on data s

When I was in middle school, a friend and I had an internship with a physicist who wanted us to write some software to perform a simple transformation on data sets that he downloaded by FTP from some experiment. We spent about a week writing a program in QuickBASIC that successfully parsed the files and performed the transformation. Some years later, I realized that this would be a one-line awk script which I could now write in 20-30 seconds. (Probably someone comfortable with Excel could also perform the transformation in 20-30 seconds, although it might not scale as well to larger files.)