Unix’s elegant pipe operator (|)—allowing sysadmins to effortlessly chain commands together—was invented largely because of programmer laziness. Douglas McIlroy, fed up with writing tedious intermediate files and shuffling data manually, demanded a simpler solution. His colleagues at Bell Labs grudgingly obliged, introducing the pipe as an inter-process communication mechanism. Laziness triumphed spectacularly: pipes not only saved effort, but also became a cornerstone of Unix’s elegant modular design philosophy. Decades later, we have sysadmins piping commands together into monstrous, unmaintainable one-liners—exactly as McIlroy intended.
