If you do "blah | sort", then "sort" could ask its upstream processing node whether it supported sorting on the requisite fields, and "push down" the necessary sort-order descriptor into the "blah" step.

That requires two things: That the pipe API sets up a communications channel between the two programs in a way that makes them aware of each other and able to exchange information; and secondly, that the pipe protocol is based on typed, structured data. I want both things.

Imagine if you had that, then you could conceivably also do:

    psql -c "select firstname, lastname from foo" |
      sort -f lastname

    select firstname, lastname from foo order by lastname

The inability to do this sort of thing really a product of a failure to modernize the 1970s text-oriented pipe data model. I believe PowerShell (which I've never used, only read about) provides a mechanism to accomplish this sort of thing, at the expense of being extremely Microsoft-flavoured.

I don't think there's anything even vaguely scifi about those abilities, but the Unix world is hampered by a curious reticence to innovate certain core technologies such as, well, Unix itself. That's why we still have tmux and such.