Why is it not valid today?

> One-liners which pipe text between four or five different commands are the equivalent of hand-soldered boards or bitwise arithmetic.

Why is that bad? Don't deploy a supercomputer to do what a hand soldered board can. Keep it simple.

I don't see how you equate piping commands to bitwise arithmetic, but bitwise arithmetic is easy anyway.

> but of no practical utility

Says you. Just because you don't find something useful doesn't mean nobody else finds it useful.

Turning one liner piped commands to a program in what you might consider a "proper programming language" usually ends up turning a declarative program into something prodecural. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Just saying.

Use the right tool for the job. In some cases (not all) the shell is indeed the right tool.

I get a feeling you don't understand the Unix philosophy. Read The Art of Unix Programming by Eric S. Raymond. Go learn bitwise arithmetic.

The uneducated play with pictures. Educated people read and write :)

Have a great day (or night, depending on your timezone — night here).