The pipeline pattern — chaining transformations left to right

This runs removeExtraSpaces first, then trim, then capitalize — but reading it left to right, capitalize (the last step) appears first. Untangling what actually runs before what means reading from the inside out, which gets genuinely hard to follow once more than two or three functions are nested.

Now the code reads in the exact order the transformations actually happen — first removeExtraSpaces, then trim, then capitalize, top to bottom — matching the mental model of "data flows through a series of steps" far more directly than nested parentheses do.

Some libraries offer compose instead of (or alongside) pipe — the only difference is which direction the list of functions is read:

Both produce identical results for the same functions — pipe matches how most people read left-to-right code and describes the steps in execution order; compose matches traditional mathematical function notation (h(g(f(x))), read right to left). Neither is more "correct"; picking one convention and using it consistently within a codebase is what actually matters.

The pipeline pattern shows up constantly outside pure functional code too — Unix shell pipes (cat file | grep error | sort | uniq) are the exact same idea: data flowing left to right through a sequence of independent transformations, each one doing one job, composed together instead of written as one large function trying to do everything at once. Recognizing "this is a pipeline" is recognizing one of the most transferable patterns in this entire domain — it shows up under different names in shell scripting, data processing libraries, and middleware chains alike.