Out of core computations. While your python and R script will choke after reading few hundred megs, my compiled binary cli will keep streaming through many such files with memory usage sitting somewhere near zero.
I keep multiple little Python scripts around to do things like sum lists of numbers (think extracting a column with awk, then calculating a sum). Compiled vs an interpreted script really doesn’t matter. What matters is using the right algorithm for the job. R and Python data science libraries like to read in all of the data at once into one single data structure. That’s the anti-pattern to avoid if at all possible.
(But they are very handy for small datasets of complex calculations that require the entire dataset in memory. )