1. Others have answered it well. Tons of languages have pipe operators. I used | in my example because I figured more readers will recognize bash piping than other notations.

2. Yes that's what I mean by dependent types, where types depend on values, like f(0): string and f(1): int. And yes, they totally are orthogonal. However, pure functional programming tends to lean on its type system more than other styles, in my experience. But then without dependent types, something as simple as loading a CSV gets hairy relative to something like pandas's pd.read_csv. Maybe others can go into why pure FP and static typing go so much together, but I gotta get back to work.