That's true, in these cases I usually write a function that's basically a composition of functions. The power of the pipeline operator is ad-hoc function compos

That's true, in these cases I usually write a function that's basically a composition of functions. The power of the pipeline operator is ad-hoc function composition. This is useful if you have lots of very generic functions, and don't want to name every single composition. There is already the f(g(h(x))) syntax, of course, but it's not the most readable. I do agree in general that this operator isn't really needed. Probably not worse than Python's := or structural pattern matching, it's one of those things where either you base the language on it, or you don't and adding it is not really necessary.