Speaking for myself, the first form is more natural- even if it’s a useless cat, because I’m always cat-ing files to see their structure. Then progressively tacking on different transforms. And then finally putting it in whatever I want as output.
It’s so ingrained, I’m more likely than not to just write it out that way even when I know exactly what I’m doing from the onset.
“I want to learn how to do X, but I have no idea what that’s going to take.”
And I end up just coding a logical step and if I don’t know what to do go research it, realize I did something wrong 3 steps ago and then either revert or abandon depending on my current motivation.
I’ve tried before to create a “game plan” before but most of the time there’s so much that I don’t know that I don’t know that it’s either impossible to make that plan or once I do, that plan ends up being wrong anyways.
As such it always feels like I’m doing side projects wrong. But since they’re more learning endeavors more than actually trying to launch a product maybe that’s fine?
The wording is potentially confusing, though.