> This is why I'm happy to see the pipe syntax proposal, it avoids unnecessary temporary variables while simultaneously aiding readability.

The thing is I don't think it's all that much more readable. No matter which syntax you use, there's still the same number of "things" going on in a single statement.

I do have to admit I never worked with a language that uses |>, so I'm sure that with increased familiarly with this it would become "more readable" to me, but one has to wonder: just how many calling syntaxes does one language have to support? More syntax also means more potential for confusion, more ways to abuse the language/feature, more "individual programming styles", more argueing over "should we write it like this or that?", more overhead in deciding how to write something, harder to implement the language and write tooling for it, and things like that.

There is always a trade-off involved. The question to ask isn't "would this be helpful in some scenarios?" because the answer to that is always "yes" for practically any language feature. The question to ask "is this useful enough to warrant the downsides of extra syntax?" I'm not so sure that it is, as it doesn't really allow me to do anything new that I couldn't do before as far as I can see. It just allows me to make things that are already too complex a bit more readable (arguably).

> I do have to admit I never worked with a language that uses |>

Have you never worked with Bash? It's basically the same thing

Indeed it is, but it's kind of a different context than a "real" programming language. What works for one doesn't necessarily work well for the other.

Truly, one of the main reasons I might stop increasing the complexity of a bash one-liner and move it to a full shell script, or bail for Python, is specifically so I can turn those chains of pipes into imperative steps with temp vars so that they're actually legible and easy to reason about. I can't imagine why I'd want to go the other direction.