Why Julia doesn't consider maximum function in the chained functions?

I’ve just got aware of chaining functions (like a pipeline) in Julia for a couple of days. I was trying something today and got an unexpected result. Hence, I decided to ask about the root of the problem better to understand the behavior of Julia in chaining functions. Consider this example:

julia> a = [1 2 3]
1×3 Matrix{Int64}:
 1  2  3

Then I want to chain some functions like the below, and after all, I want the maximum value of the entire Matrix:

julia> a .|> x->x^2 .|> sqrt .|> Int64 |> maximum
1×3 Matrix{Int64}:
 1  2  3

But I expected just a 3! Why doesn’t Julia consider that last function of the chain, namely, the maximum function?

PS: Also, I tried this way:

julia> a .|> x->x^2 .|> sqrt .|> Int64 |> x->maximum(x)
1×3 Matrix{Int64}:
 1  2  3

Still not what I expected it to be.

>Solution :

The issue is associativity of |>, see https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/mathematical-operations/#Operator-Precedence-and-Associativity. As you can see:

julia> :(a .|> x->x^2 .|> sqrt .|> Int64 |> maximum)
:(a .|> (x->begin
              #= REPL[11]:1 =#
              ((x ^ 2 .|> sqrt) .|> Int64) |> maximum
          end))

To resolve this put the first part (before broadcast) in parentheses:

julia> (a .|> x->x^2 .|> sqrt .|> Int64) |> maximum
3

However, I personally in such cases prefer to use composition:

julia> maximum((Int64∘sqrt∘(x->x^2)).(a))
3