Erlang was originally either implemented in Prolog or was even a library / extension for Prolog, and its pattern matching functionality is just "because it was

Erlang was originally either implemented in Prolog or was even a library / extension for Prolog, and its pattern matching functionality is just "because it was all Prolog and the developers were using Prolog", so it isn't really fair to give Erlang any credit at all for that as it wasn't even independently designed.