Pipes are also related to the IO monad, similar in a way with the jQuery syntax which is another hugely popular case. I am utterly amazed how they invented such a powerful concept of functional programming for the shell (well, not 100% pure functional, if there are side effects)
>You might be interested in the classic McIlroy-Knuth dialogue:
Yes, that was a good article. The comments on the post were interesting too. Saw it a while ago, and for fun, wrote two quick solutions for the problem, in Python and shell:
