IIRC the usual workaround in Elixir involves be small lambda that rearranges things:
"World"
|> then(&concat("Hello ", &1))
I imagine a shorter syntax could someday be possible, where some special placeholder expression could be used, ex:
"World"
|> concat("Hello ", &1)
However that creates a new problem: If the implicit-first-argument form is still permitted (foo() instead of foo(&1)) then it becomes confusing which function-arity is being called. A human could easily fail to notice the absence or presence of the special placeholder on some lines, and invoke the wrong thing.
Yeah, R (tidyverse) has `.` as such a placeholder. It is useful but indeed I find the syntax off, though I find the syntax off even without it, anyway. I would rather define pipes as compositions of functions, which are pretty unambiguous in terms of what arguments they get, and then apply these to whatever i want.
Last time I checked (2020) there were already a few rejected proposals to shorten the syntax for this. It seemed like they were pretty exasperated by them at the time.
