###Andrew Alexander
A loose transcription of an impromptu five-minute presentation at the Recurse Center, 5 May 2016
##Pattern-matching
(I don't think "pattern matching" is a great name, but this is what everyone calls it.) Anyway, in normal programming, you define a function exactly ONCE, and if you need it to behave differently depending on what its input is, you have to write if
-then
branches or switch
or case
statements, and things can get very ugly very fast.