Yes! Anybody who knows me in person is probably tired of hearing about how good pattern matching is by now. :) I definitely know what you mean about missing it

Yes! Anybody who knows me in person is probably tired of hearing about how good pattern matching is by now. :) I definitely know what you mean about missing it in languages without it, that's why I've been working on tamale. I can't speak for Scala, but the PM in Haskell and OCaml is a bit different since it's informed by the static typing. When patterns have variant types (i.e., x is either Foo, Bar, or Baz * int), it also checks for complete coverage. Same general concept, different flavor. Also very useful. I mentioned Prolog in particular because its emphasis on unification and backtracking make it the most pattern-matching-centric programming language I've seen. Where other languages have pattern matching, it almost is pattern matching. Also, there are well-known ways to compile pattern specifications into efficient decision trees, so while it's a very expressive abstraction, it's not necessarily an expensive one. If they're being constructed at runtime (as they are in my Lua library), you can generally get a big improvement by just indexing on the patterns' first fields and doing linear search thereafter.