Even in the context of bioinformatics my comment applies. With modern C++ libraries you are able to replicate the numpy user experience almost line by line. A baseline FASTQ parser in modern C++ would look nothing like the fastq.h C parser the author presented. Naive versions of sequence alignment algorithms like Needleman-Wunsch are easily implemented in C++ aswell and you can even do most of your development in a Jupyter notebook with cling/xeus.