matplotlib VS vnlog

By using pybind11 that one can be written with far fewer lines of code.

For simple analyses (i.e. what most people do most of the time) doing this on the commandline gets you there faster. I use vnlog (https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog/). By the time you fired up your editor to write your Python code, I already have analyses and plots ready.

Alternative very appropriate for some uses cases: `vnl-join` from the vnlog toolkit (https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog). Uses the `join` tool from coreutils (works well, has been around forever), and `vnlog` for nice column labelling

There's also https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog/ which is a wrapper around the existing coreutils, so all the options work, and there's nothing to learn

And to improve the ergonomics, the vnlog wrappers are available to operate on field names, while retaining the internals of the core tools:

  https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog/

I sorta, kinda agree. Tools written in AWK (and friends) are indeed somewhat unmaintainable, but they're really close to being just right for a LOT of applications. The vnlog toolkit (https://github.com/dkogan/vnlog) adds just a little bit of syntactic sugar to the usual commandline tools to make processing scripts robust and easy to read and write. This was not my intent initially, but I now do most of my data processing with the shell and vnl-wrapped awk (and sort and join, ...) It's really nice. If you write stuff in awk, you should check it out. (Disclaimer: I'm the author)