I disagree about the primacy of naming and metaphor here. From my perspective, the only reason the unix pipe is intuitive to people is that it actually behaves

I disagree about the primacy of naming and metaphor here. From my perspective, the only reason the unix pipe is intuitive to people is that it actually behaves like a pipe. I don't think that the abstraction of 'pipe' started by thinking of the metaphor, but rather it started by thinking about how best to reduce complexity when it comes to IO operations, and it just so happened that the best way to do it was with something resembling an actual pipe. That is to say, the first step is to find the representation of something which reduces overall complexity, and the next step is to think about naming. In my experience, one of the signs that you've found the right abstraction is that it's easy to find a name for it, because the intrinsic complexity of most things is low (or at least lower than I thought when I started programming), and so it's not hard to find metaphors when your abstraction brings the extrinsic complexity of a system down towards the level of intrinsic complexity of its requirements.