I find this far more compelling for anthropological reasons than technical ones.
I couldn't possibly disagree more. The composition of programs through pipes remains a brilliant idea, and an extremely effective way to get a job done. I've lost track of the number of times I've heard a new programming tool described as "It's like Unix pipes for..." C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every respec…
Except pipes were already present in another operating systems at the time, http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/hist.html
> C is still a remarkably popular programming language, and it has proven surprisingly hard to invent a new language that's better than C in every respect.
In 70's already had a few system programming languages better than C in every respect, safety, modularization, thread support, low level programming, you name it.
C's widespread into the industry is a consequence of UNIX adoption by the industry.