I saw this video posted on programming.reddit.com, and really liked what I saw. There is also a paper that covers the mechanism more. I have always had something of a disgust at what I see as the accidental complexities of GUI programming (although I think Cocoa and Interface Builder do a good job) and that Unix has failed to evolve its best construct (the pipe) to what it ought to be. This failure probably has to do with the "text-streams as universal interface" mantra that, while useful for a good many things, cripples it as a more useful mechanism outside of the shell.
PS. If you want to see download and watch the video from YouTube on your Mac, check out these introductory videos from Perion, which allow you to watch FLV videos inside any Quicktime application. The videos also show a very simple way to download YouTube videos using Safari. Although, for some reason, Quicktime Pro won't offer to let me export the video to another codec, so I resorted to recording the screen to get it into a format suitable to give to a collegue at work.