I stand corrected. In a very eloquent way, I might add.
FWIW, my aversion to the pipe would be much mitigated if it were observable. This would give it a tangible, as opposed to purely cosmetic, advantage over the nested function calls, without the need for “yucky code” (which is itself a tradeoff of immutability).
A contrived example based on the above, where I am arbitrarily choosing to say that the pipe operator on its own returns a list of the individual steps as it were an alias for [V1, V2, V3, V4, Vn]:
Eshell V12.1.3 (abort with ^G)
1> X |> atom_to_list
1> |> list_to_binary
1> |> capitalize_binary
1> |> binary_to_list
1> |> binary_to_atom.
'ERLANG'
2> |>.
["Erlang", ..., ..., "ERLANG", 'ERLANG']
This is purely for illustrative purposes, so please don’t consider it a suggested syntax. I’d be very interested to learn if something akin to this is feasible in Elixir.