Does the web need something like this today and in what form? All the replacements that are offered pale in comparison to excitement it was to use Pipes 15 years ago. Are we simply past that point?
I skipped to chapter 9 in the article ("Clogged"), and it looked like Pipes failed because it didn't have a large enough team or a well-defined mission. As a result they couldn't offer a super robust product that would lure in enterprise users. "You could not purchase some number of guaranteed-to-work Pipes calls per month" is the quote from the article.
The reason I think that interesting is because that's the model these days for everything from AI tokens to Monday.com seats. It makes me feel like Pipes was before its time.
That said I've been collecting different "business glue" products that are similar to Pipes. To me, like you say, they aren't as interesting, exciting and intuitive as Pipes was, but maybe it just takes a little more digging. I tried to focus on open source tools but some aren't.
Big Node-RED fan here. For me it has the perfect combination between visual flow based programming[0] and textual coding. It makes a great effort in making visual programming incredible efficient.
Node-RED does great job in implementing the ideas of FBP in visual manner.
There are so many quality of life improvements I could make for myself if only Pipes was still around. Nothing I've encountered since has ever matched or beat it.
Does the web need something like this today and in what form? All the replacements that are offered pale in comparison to excitement it was to use Pipes 15 years ago. Are we simply past that point?