I'm not sure what technical debt you are referring to. Awk is designed to do one very simple job, and it does so using a language that I can usually teach to

I'm not sure what technical debt you are referring to. Awk is designed to do one very simple job, and it does so using a language that I can usually teach to new SREs in < 2 Hours with 9-10 follow up tasks that drill in their understanding. It's benefited from extraordinarily enlightened stewardship, kept it's minimalism and strengths, and will finally get a key enhancement (UTF-8 support). The first edition manual is probably the greatest example I've ever seen of technical writing as well.