The Point of Pointfree

What makes Unix shell scripting special?

Sample Unix shell command:

grep '^X-Spam-Level' | sort | unique | wc -l

length . nub . sort . filter (isPrefixOf "X-Spam-Level")

<sarcasm>

Pointfree combinator programming is very intimidating, abstract, and is no more than a theoretical curiosity --- you always put the points back in real programs. Unix shell pipelining is very intuitive, down-to-earth, and is a matter of bread-and-butter --- it is impractical to create, track, and clean up temporary files in real applications.

</sarcasm>

This was part of a post on comp.lang.functional (Google copy).