Why don't I see pipe operators in most high-level languages?

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In Unix shell programming the pipe operator is an extremely powerful tool. With a small set of core utilities, a systems language (like C) and a scripting language (like Python) you can construct extremely compact and powerful shell scripts, that are automatically parallelized by the operating system.

Obviously this is a very powerful programming paradigm, but I haven't seen pipes as first class abstractions in any language other than a shell script. The code needed to replicate the functionality of scripts using pipes seems to always be quite complex.

So my question is why don't I see something similar to Unix pipes in modern high-level languages like C#, Java, etc.? Are there languages (other than shell scripts) which do support first class pipes? Isn't it a convenient and safe way to express concurrent algorithms?

Just in case someone brings it up, I looked at the F# pipe-forward operator (forward pipe operator), and it looks more like a function application operator. It applies a function to data, rather than connecting two streams together, as far as I can tell, but I am open to corrections.

Postscript: While doing some research on implementing coroutines, I realize that there are certain parallels. In a blog post Martin Wolf describes a similar problem to mine but in terms of coroutines instead of pipes.

concurrency language-agnostic pipe programming-languages shell
16 Answers

Since R added pipe operator today, it's worth to mention Julialang has pipe all a long:

help?> |>
search: |>

  |>(x, f)


  Applies a function to the preceding argument. This allows for easy function chaining.

  Examples
  ≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡≡

  julia> [1:5;] |> x->x.^2 |> sum |> inv
  0.01818181818181818
user_29606950
user_11391960

In Mathematica, you can use //

for example

f[g[h[x,parm1],parm2]]

quite a mess.

could be written as

x // h[#, parm1]& // g[#, parm2]& // f

the # and & is lambda in Mathematica

In js, there seems to be pipe operator |> soon.

https://github.com/tc39/proposal-pipeline-operator

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