I didn’t see the original, but the FP example here looks fairly idiomatic to me.

An alternative, which in FP-friendly languages would have almost identical performance, would be to make the shift in objects more explicit:

    var favoriteFoodsOfFurryPetsOfFamousAuthorsOfLongChineseBooksAboutHistory =
      books
        .filter(book => isLongChineseBookAboutHistory(book))
        .map(book => book.author)
        .filter(author => isFamous(author))
        .flatMap(author => author.pets)
        .filter(pet => pet.isFurry)
        .map(pet => pet.favouriteFood)
        .distinct()

I slightly prefer this style with such a long pipeline, because to me it’s now built from standard patterns with relatively simple and semantically meaningful descriptions of what fills their holes. Obviously there’s some subjective judgement involved with anything like this; for example, if the concept of an author being famous was a recurring one then I’d probably want it defined in one place like an `isFamous` function, but if this were the only place in the code that needed to make that decision, I might inline the comparison.