Not sure if this is what you want, but you can pipe emacs regions into shell commands, which interoperates nicely with lots of stuff. I routinely hit M-| to make plots with feedgnuplot. Works great
Ok, yeah. I had no clue that was a thing. That will be extremely useful. I'm often running python in a buffer and being able to run commands on output is a dream. Thanks dima55 and thank you emacs.