While I agree switch on true might be an 'abuse' of the switch statement, I'm not sure about the last example. In Elixir, I find myself using: if x do <

While I agree switch on true might be an 'abuse' of the switch statement, I'm not sure about the last example. In Elixir, I find myself using: if x do <blah> else <bleh> end only in situations where I'm almost certain I won't end up having more cases, and in practice I tend to limit myself even to conditionals that are short, where I can do: if x, do: y, else: z But in many, many situations I go for: case x do <condition 1> -> <stuff> <condition 2> -> <other stuff> end because it looks cleaner, and because I often end up adding another condition. Furthermore, there's also 'cond', which looks similar. using 'case' and 'cond' often just seems clearer to me over having a quite different syntax in the one situation where there's only two options ('if'). (not having to 'break' makes a big difference though)