"UNIX pipelines": Yes, this is where I stopped reading. The author claims that

> UNIX pipelines routinely compose dozens of programs into complex

> workflows, yet they require no type checking at the transport

> layer. The individual programs trust that data flowing between

> them consists of simple, agreed-upon formats—usually lines of

> text separated by newlines.

The transport layer is not the relevant layer; it's the programs in between that matter. If you're just looking for words or characters or something, that's straightforward enough--but the equivalent in programming is passing strings from one function to another. You run into problems when program 1 in the pipeline uses tab delimiters, whereas program 2 was expecting space characters or commas or something, and program 3 is expecting tokens in the pipe to be in a different order, or program 4 doesn't know what to do when some records have three tokens and others have four or two or something.