Yep, anything more than 1 line would be a python script. The author vaguely tries to answer that but doesn't really give anything more satisfying than "you can

Yep, anything more than 1 line would be a python script. The author vaguely tries to answer that but doesn't really give anything more satisfying than "you can rewrite it in python" and "why not?". And if it's something you don't know and are experimenting with, you can also open ipython and play around with the data (kinda like he's doing throughout the article) and keep your variables between each run without having to write intermediate values to disk or keep piping over and over. Let alone the huge stdlib and 3rd party lib you have access to if needed.