> Elixir's novelty, the pipe operator, is a fantastic approach to working with state in a functional manner. Instead of running readlines(fopen(user_input(), "r")).uppercase().split(), try the more readable user_input |> fopen("r") |> readlines |> uppercase |> split.

The pipe operator isn't Elixir's "novelty". Also, why is it better than the '.' syntax:

> fromFile(userInput).getLines.map(_.toUpperCase)

Do you get code completion for it as in an oop-ish language?