We're already creating ad-hoc APIs using cut, sed and awk and grep (to name a but a few) all the time in order to massage the data into a format the next program in the chain will understand. This sometimes involves non-trivial invocation chains, I always feel like I'm working on a representation of the data rather than the data itself.

I would much rather have functional primitives (map, filter, reduce, zip, take, drop, etc) doing this work.