Why does everyone keep trying to replace Erlang's syntax? The syntax pretty closely reflects the feature set, unless you're significantly expanding that why bother, you're only going make it worse.
If "everyone" includes Elixir, I'd argue otherwise. While syntax is a part of Elixir, them much bigger deal is the addition of Macros and Protocols. I'd also weakly suggest that while the pipe operator is just syntax, it changes idiomatic usage drastically.