There was a parsetransform (think the erlang form of macro’s, but harder to build,lol) that supported pipelines, wasn’t bad, but still not something I’d use in production, lol. I’d definitely be for erlang adding a pipeline operator though, perhaps just |> and <| both to append (since erlang defaults to the end argument being the operational data in most cases) for |> and the <| is to take the right data as a chunk to pass into the latest argument (binding tighter than |> as is traditional in ML languages).
Yeah I know where that comes from but it’s still one of the bigger things I’m not a fan of, though it’s so minor so as to be barely mentionable, lol.
Overall though I still love the erlang syntax, over 20 years later, it’s nice and succinct and simple, no surprises.
It’s just simple lisp’y style code generation, so you can do things like build entire optimized http server middleware with but a couple of commands or generate a whole typed module from a simple definition all at compile time including compile time checks and whatever else you want. It’s pretty powerful, and it is absolutely possible for someone to build something similar in Erlang (like via a parse transform or so), just hasn’t been done yet.