I used awk 20 years back. Then I moved on. My awk scripts still run, those in other languages don't (major version changes e.g.). Also, I began manipulating text using grep, cut, sed and sort, but found that these read through the file each time, becoming slow as data increases. Using awk you can search, filter and manipulate data in ONE iteration of the file making it very fast. And so i once again brushed up on awk.

btw, i suggest using gawk since it has date functions.