> Quite a few times I was surprised that Rust breaks with some old patterns that were copied over and over in the last 50 years or so. For example: "match" instead of "switch", or the same if/else regardless if it is a statement or a value. These are small touches, but they show attention to detail.

These are good ideas for sure, but they are bread and butter to anyone who is familiar with functional programming. The Lisp and ML families of languages have had them for many decades.

The fact that more languages _aren't_ like this is what's surprising to me, given how effective they are. I love that Rust is bringing them to the masses, but what on earth took the industry so long to accept them?

I guess the answer is that algebraic data types (inductively defined data) tend to be pitted against object-oriented programming (coinductively defined data), and object-oriented programming has dominated the industry for the past 3 decades. Some languages like Kotlin have tried to combine them, but personally I'd rather just embrace the former and relegate the latter to a seldomly-used design pattern, not a programming paradigm hardcoded into the language.