Interesting. I found it immensely liberating to be able to fully separate the functions from the data they operate on. I can see how it might feel verbose though.
I don't feel liberated when I program in Elixir but the other languages I use for customers are Ruby, Python and JavaScript, which are quite liberal. It's been so long since I used Java that I can't really appreciate anymore how big the difference is. For sure I don't want to go back to those times.
IMHO "this is a string" |> String.split(" ") doesn't fully separate the data from the function. It's String.split after all and it won't work with an input of any other type.
However, at least in the case of languages with duck typing, some_object.split(" ") works with an object of type String and with any other class that implements a split method that takes a string as argument. Then the rest of the code must be able to keep handling the duck typed object.
Probably this isn't the way you are thinking about data/code separation, still it's a kind of separation.
Well, I came from Javascript/Ruby/Python (and still like those too), so for me it really was the functional nature of Elixir that felt 'liberating'.
Using String.split() instead of an method call on the string is just one of the reasons I like this rather stricter separation between data and code, and I do see how in isolation it's not all that great.
That said, I still enjoy the more OO languages and rather like using some of the FP things I've learned inside those. And sometimes it does feel convenient to not be pushed into one particular style of coding. So perhaps 'liberating' is not the best choice of words :).
