I just watched top on a long job that ran through a series of pipes. It was fascinating, because some of the processes needed the whole input, so even though I said “run all of these in parallel”, what actually happened was that the “as you go” programs executed in parallel and the “read it all and process” programs executed in sequence. And the processor usage percentage reflected this. It was neat, and I feel like it shows off the power of pipes. We really need some kind of notion of pipes for GUIS. Perhaps a transparent “this chunk of the canvas is yours, do with it what you will” kind of operator. I dunno.