As someone who originally would have strongly agreed with you, I think there is actually huge benefits to thinking in this "streaming" mindset.
That is, the first place I really encountered code like this was when Java introduced streams [1]. I wasn't used to programming like this when I first experienced this code, and at first I found it harder to read; it felt obfuscated.
As I got more used to it, though, I started to love it. There are tons of operations in programming like this, where you're really just performing a successive series of transformations on a set of data. Obviously functional programmers are familiar with this, but this is also the paradigm for shell programming, where you're just piping stdout to the next small little program in the chain.
The thing is, now I really feel a bit of a "switch" in my brain when I read code like this. That is, whenever I see this, I'm just like "OK, doing a whole bunch of data processing from some input set to a final output". Over time, when done correctly, I actually find this easier to read, with less verboseness, because my brain already has tons of context about what's going on.
That is, the first place I really encountered code like this was when Java introduced streams [1]. I wasn't used to programming like this when I first experienced this code, and at first I found it harder to read; it felt obfuscated.
As I got more used to it, though, I started to love it. There are tons of operations in programming like this, where you're really just performing a successive series of transformations on a set of data. Obviously functional programmers are familiar with this, but this is also the paradigm for shell programming, where you're just piping stdout to the next small little program in the chain.
The thing is, now I really feel a bit of a "switch" in my brain when I read code like this. That is, whenever I see this, I'm just like "OK, doing a whole bunch of data processing from some input set to a final output". Over time, when done correctly, I actually find this easier to read, with less verboseness, because my brain already has tons of context about what's going on.
1. Some Java streams examples, https://winterbe.com/posts/2014/07/31/java8-stream-tutorial-...