The key benefit of pattern matching is not code that is more concise, but code that is more likely to be correct. Consider their first example, interpreting a

The key benefit of pattern matching is not code that is more concise, but code that is more likely to be correct. Consider their first example, interpreting a command in a textual game. In many places the logic is divided into a few pieces: check that there are the right number of arguments, do something with some of them, pull off the rest, etc. It's really easy to make mistakes with this kind of code, where your conditions don't quite align. With pattern matching, you write a single pattern for a case, and I would expect this to give many fewer bugs.