Comment by corank

As I understand it this is precisely why in Haskell and OCaml standard libraries we get lots of things like

  map : (a -> b) -> a list -> b list

instead of

  map : a list -> (a -> b) -> b list

The main argument (data to be operated on) is positioned last, after the others which are more like parameters that tune the function. It's to allow chaining these things up left to right like Unix pipes:

  map f l |> filter g |> ...