Python is fairly slow and I'm pretty sure it was even slower back then. Parsing tens of millions of lines of text, splitting them, converting to numbers, lookin

Python is fairly slow and I'm pretty sure it was even slower back then. Parsing tens of millions of lines of text, splitting them, converting to numbers, looking things up in a giant dictionary, etc. adds up. I remember inlining functions by hand to increase performance in Python back then. AWK is optimized for parsing text and has the performance of a compiled language.