[9fans] data analysis on plan9

[hugo rivera <uair00@gmail.com>]

Hi,
since I discovered plan 9, about two years ago, I've been constantly
amazed by its simple yet quite powerful design.
>From one year now, I am looking forward to move to plan 9 as my main
OS, but I am not able to do so because it lacks the data analysis
tools available in some other systems, like linux.
Because my work involves dealing with data coming from experiments in
astro-particle physics, I am more or less tied to data analysis
software like the R programming language, Python's Numpy, Cern's ROOT
and even gnuplot. While using them, I realized that most of the time I
deal with text files that go here and there as input or output of
small specific programs that perform a given task (I don't know if
this is the result of my Unix/Plan 9 background or just a
coincidence). Say I have a command 'clean' that removes undesired
points from a body of data, and another command 'four' that performs
the FFT; so they are used together as
clean data.txt | four > results.txt
so it occurred to me that one can create single commands to interact
among them to perform some analysis on data, just like in the original
Unix style. Awk can be used as glue among them, with some other small
glue utilities. Plotting data is another thing that I would like to
integrate into this, since plots are quite frequent while analysing
data, but I am not sure how.
Also, something similar to GSL (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/)
would be invaluable or maybe even indispensable.
Maybe some day I'll start to write some commands for plan 9 to begin
working on it, but I want to convince myself that this is worth the
time spent.
What do you think of this? my main concern is that perhaps the "do one
thing well" design falls short for data analysis. I've never seen
people work like this on data analysis before (but I do not think I am
the first to do it) because in general, they tend to use large data
analysis frameworks. I'd really appreciate some feedback on this from
people working on data analysis and also from the plan 9 community
(otherwise I wouldn't be writing here :-)
Saludos

--
Hugo