Pipes were simple enough that they won: https://apenwarr.ca/log/?m=200801#31
It's a pretty limited API though, and I wonder what an incremental improvement in power would look like.
miniblog.
Related Posts
Achievement unlocked: when trying to work around an Emacs bug with long lines and pipes: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=6149#19 I hit a bug in Cask, the Emacs environment manager! https://github.com/cask/cask/pull/596
Software is hard.
The Rise of the Stupid Network: a remarkable 1997 essay on what ISPs as dumb bit pipes enables, moving innovation to client devices on the internet, and avoiding the scarcity mindset from when hardware was expensive:
https://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html
On the early metaphors that drove the original development of Unix: https://zge.us.to/txt/unix-harmful.html
(Lots of typewriter influence, and amazingly the first versions did not have a notion of pipes!)