Pattern matching was introduced as a major language feature in Ruby 2.7 and has been improved in subsequent releases, but not many people are using it yet.

It’s really helpful and can make your programs clearer, simpler, safer, or all three. So why aren’t you using it? You should totally use it! I’ll show you how.

Tom is a computer scientist, longtime Rubyist and Senior Staff Engineer at Shopify. He has taught optimising compilers at the University of Cambridge and written about technology for the Guardian. His book about computation theory in Ruby, “Understanding Computation”, is published by O’Reilly.