Bash pipes make intuitive sense, you’re taking the output of one process and pushing it into another. Here, the use of pipes makes little sense. Why is “from alpine” being passed into “with-exec”? What is moving between those processes?
In this case, `from alpine` is a function attached to the container type that has many additional functions. You chain them together to do stuff. You can do it through code as if it was any other object, but this shell allows you to do things without code as well.
Perhaps the example is too simple to feel useful, but being able to pipe primitives like files, directories, containers, secrets, and even any custom object makes it possible to rapidly experiment with and compose pipelines.
`container().from('alpine').withExec(args: ["apk", "add"]).terminal()`
If it was unix pipes, they'd be context independent tools being composed together.
Dagger can be a useful but I feel a bit deceived, and it makes me worry about the rest of the quality of this product.
So it’s a bit of a hybrid between bash and powershell.