I don't understand your hostility to pipes. It seems to be based on the fact that they were invented some time ago? On the contrary, the soundness of an idea famous enough to be known today is probably positively correlated with how old it is.<p>Pipes are a combination of dataflow programming and monadic computation, and are naturally parallelizable, functional and generally pipe processes don't share mutable state. All these concepts are highly relevant to modern programming.