[chubot]

I'm pretty sure that's "interior" piping to ABS functions like split() and map()

As opposed to "exterior" piping to executables like grep and xargs, which may be written in any language

I believe the comment you're replying to is saying that's a design MISTAKE

And I agree -- in trying to make shell more consistent, you've actually REDUCED its power

I wrote a blog post about this issue:

Oils Is Exterior-First (Code, Text, and Structured Data) - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2023/06/ysh-design.html

(which was aimed at people working on Oils, not general users. Hopefully a more concise/illustrative post will appear, though I also welcome anyone else like the OP who wants to argue this ! )