[jauntywundrkind]

Ageeed. The chained style is Points-free or tacit (never heard anyone use that term in the wild) programming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming

My opion here but: generally not a fan. Explicitness is a virtue. That itself can go overboard too!

In the olden days the chained syntax was also worryingly low performance: ideally you want to iterate only as many times as you have to, doing as much work per pass as you can rather than spreading it out across passes. The example code also creates intermediate arrays, versus working on place: not always possible but over allocating was another "are you trying to make this page look jank" trigger. The chained syntax prevents you from dealing with either, albeit iteration helpers somewhat ameliorate this.

Perl was very fun to write because there are so many predefined variables that would automatically be written to and read from. It allowed for imperative-ish code that still was incredibly tacit. All the data flow was implicit. Fun to write, incredibly hard to visualize.

I do wish we saw IDEs that made data flow analysis more visible. Overlay the source code with the compiler's sea of nodes, show the us the graph of compute that actually constitutes a section. I think we could be augmenting ourselves to do much more with implicit styles, to get the visibility of our code "for free", and at an even more explicit visually clear way than using lots of intermediate variables. Oh to dream.