Don't forget Aaron Turon (employed by Mozilla to work on the design of the std library), who, among other things, wrote the "fluent" APIs for process[1] and task[2] spawning, which possibly inspired the redis-rs API Armin describes in this post.
I'm so glad that Aaron is on the core team, focusing specifically on API design and ergonomics, rather than just the language. He has definitely been applying much needed polish that we need for a slick 1.0 release.
Just wanted to also add that in an area of design with lots of strongly held subjective opinion and rampant bikeshedding, Aaron has shown himself to be incredibly thoughtful, well-measured, and diplomatic. Really a great addition to the team!
Yep, the command builder of the process module was the inspiration for the pipeline system. Lots of other inspiration came from libserialize where I got loads of the type conversion (and especially tuple code) from.
[1]: http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/io/process/struct.Comma...
[2]: http://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/std/task/struct.TaskBuilder...