Not as uncommon as you are suggesting I would think. These particular tools and languages are often learned as a group, because they support each other. (R is

Not as uncommon as you are suggesting I would think. These particular tools and languages are often learned as a group, because they support each other. (R is perhaps the exception, but it does actually work really well here, because it's the best tool for certain kinds of table mashing and chart creation.) Little command line tools, sqlite and short, focused programs all tied together with a makefile is a really nice way to arrange a data processing project. You end up with lots of intermediate output tables to look at, each of which is produced with a small step. This makes for easy testing and debugging.