Python 3.9 became EOL last week, which means you now have no reason to not write match statements anymore. While python’s match pattern matching isn’t as sophisticated or flexible as Elixir’s or Haskell’s, it’s still a massive improvement over other mainstream languages.

Recap

This is a recap if you’re not a pythonista; unpacking has existed since the early days. You’ve probably already done things like this

a, b = (1, 2)
print(a + b)

That’s great, and you’ve probably already tried iterable unpacking (PEP 3132)

Times have changed. The boomer-coded text editor definition of a grid of bytes is just not enough. Code has structure, tooling, footguns (especially when it’s a dynamically typed language), and many other attributes that shouldn’t be edited by typing vi code.py into a console and expecting things to be done in a timely manner while not making mistakes. It simply is not possible by a bad developer like me.

A zoomer perspective of the past

When I started to seriously code, I was already in college and LSPs were a thing. While IDEs are things I’m familiar with and use, LSPs bridge 90% of the gap. From what I’ve read on the interwebs, the IDE-only era was grim, and text editors that had genuine advantages (Emacs for extensibility and Vim for efficient editing) had their own matrix of extensions that provided a subpar experience. There were hacks for IDE-like features like ghcide, but they were never sufficient, and those hacks were for corpowagies (who didn’t write Haskell).

If you know what both WSL and Guix System, your first reaction might be a bit of a surprise. WSL is Microsoft’s Linux subsystem for Windows, a proprietary operating system that embeds candy crush ads in the start bar that is less stable than its alternatives, and everything it stands for screams corporate, while GNU Guix System is a free OS trying to be as pure as possible, both in terms of being immutable and also avoiding non-free software (not just proprietary, but also non-free source-available software). Guix is the antithesis of Windows.