[chandler]

> I imagine piping in bash feels similar...

It is. Piping is akin to an untyped subset of working with Scala's collections, and there's a similar workflow between the two, e.g.:

In bash, you build up a command line with something like (as a stupid example, the number of unique file sizes in a directory):

    Step 1) $ ls -l
    Step 2) $ ls -l | awk '{print $5}'
    Step 3) $ ls -l | awk '/\d+/ {print $5}'
    Step 4) $ ls -l | awk '/\d+/ {print $5}' | sort -n
    Step 5) $ ls -l | awk '/\d+/ {print $5}' | sort -n | uniq

You can see the correspondence with collections--typically building up in the editor in a similar staged manner ending with something like:

    Process("ls -l").lines   // ls -l part
      .map(_.split("\\s+"))  // awk part {
      .filter(_.length > 4)  //   ...
      .map(_.apply(4).toInt) // }
      .sorted                // sort -n part
      .distinct              // uniq part

The tradeoffs between the two are essentially verbosity versus data safety (perhaps not important with a throwaway inspection, but more important when working on larger programs...).

However, the building process is the same--you don't write the latter all at once, you gradually mold the pipeline until you get the output you want.