Spreadsheets are awesome, and I think that another thing people are dismissing is grep, awk and friends. I get it that both spreadsheets and unix tools might n

Spreadsheets are awesome, and I think that another thing people are dismissing is grep, awk and friends. I get it that both spreadsheets and unix tools might not be trendy, but they fulfill the Taco Bell Programming idea [1]; they provide simple, scalable, and efficient solutions. Summing data from column B for each unique value in column A would be as easy as `awk -F ',' '{a[$1] += $2} END{for (i in a) print i, a[i]}' my-input-file.csv'` Sure, it would take a few tries to get right, but could for example R do something this concise and dynamic that can run in parallel? [1] http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra...