I think you've mistaken my argument as being against pipelines, but in fact I was arguing in favor of pipelines and against one-off tricks like "grep -c". Yes,

I think you've mistaken my argument as being against pipelines, but in fact I was arguing in favor of pipelines and against one-off tricks like "grep -c". Yes, "wc -l" needs to be memorized, but once, for everything you ever wish to count, as opposed to once for every command. In this respect, "grep -c" has the same problem as you pointed out concerning "lines".