[foul]

The pipeline part and the "do one thing well" can't make anything structurally serious for the layman. But Unix had gaps for that, that plan9 in its ways fills: it has GUI, a better shell language, coroutines and file servers. The application then has to be glue code you'd write in C or Rc, you may write pipelines for some things your application does but nobody can do Excel (the way Excel does) with just a pipeline...