> No, in most cases you don't

that lets you pass the result from each function to the next without explicitly stating what form they have, yes.

You'll still be missing the conciseness/explicitness because the language isn't meant to be used like that and is missing necessary features in order to facilitate it such as pattern matching by the passed in values into function.

to make a simple example, you could theoretically write the following pseudo-code

  def sendEmail({email}) do
    // send email
  end
  def sendEmail({id}) do
    // get email address
    sendEmail({email})
  end
  sendEmail({id: 244})

or to make sure your code stops executing if an error occurs (positional return values this time)

    [:ok, msg] = sendEmail(lkajsdf)