ABSTRACT
The pipeline style captures the model of a factory pipeline, where each station, or box, does one specific task over data that flows through it. In its purest form, the pipeline style is a faithful reflection of the theory of mathematical functions, where small boxes, aka functions, take input and produce output. The pipeline programming style tries to achieve this kind of mathematical purity by seeing everything as relations mapping one set of inputs to one set of outputs. In programming, functions are everywhere, even if this programming style isn’t. Functions were invented multiple times by multiple people in multiple situations; the factory pipeline programming style is one that aims to stay faithful to mathematics, and hence it has thrived in only a niche of all the work related to functions.
