You are mistaken. Connecting them is gluing them. What you are describing is massaging the data so that the computation yields the result that you want. I am

You are mistaken. Connecting them is gluing them. What you are describing is massaging the data so that the computation yields the result that you want. I am not saying that Unix pipe got everything right, it did not. And the "everything is text" idea is a compromise that is both brilliant and awkward. It is brilliant because it means that the end-user packaging and compositional packaging of functionality is actually the same, which is generally hard to impossible to achieve, and something people generally get wrong. That is, they create end-user packaging for their components and then wonder why it doesn't compose. Or create compositional packaging and wonder why it's unusable. But of course you are stuck with the awkwardness that often things don't express so well as text. Another thing is that filter composition is only applicable to small subset of problems (though a larger one than is often thought), going outside that range quickly leads to "unnatural programs" (see Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html).