Nice article! It would help to have side-by-side comparisons of how you would accomplish the same tasks with if/else statements instead, to better illustrate the clarity and efficiency of the match statement. For example, this one's not so different: def handle_http_status(status_code): if status_code == 200: return "Success!" elif status_code in (400, 401, 403, 404): return f"Client Error:{status_code}" elif status_code in (500, 501, 502, 503, 504): return f"Server Error:{status_code}" else: return "Unknown Status" The "as err" option doesn't do much in the examples given, since you already have that value in status_code. So I simply reference status_code in the return lines. The shape example could be expressed with if/else like so: def process_shape(shape): if isinstance(shape, Circle): return f"Processing a circle with radius {shape.radius}" elif isinstance(shape, Rectangle): return f"Processing a rectangle with length {shape.length} and width {shape.width}" if isinstance(shape, Triangle): return f"Processing a triangle with base {shape.base} and height {shape.height}" else: return "Unknown shape" This is certainly more verbose than the match statement. Again, I have simply shifted the variable capture into the return statement, because why not? So far, so good. But wait! Let's try that dict example. def handle_user_action(action): if all(k in action for k in ('type', 'username', 'password')) and action['type']=='login': return f"Login attempt by {action['username']} with password {action['password']}" elif all(k in action for k in ('type', 'username')) and action['type']=='logout': return f"User {action['username']} logged out" elif all(k in action for k in ('type', 'username', 'email')) and action['type']=='signup': return f"New signup by {action['username']} with email {action['email']}" else: return "Unknown action" YUCK! Painful to read, and painful to write. You end up using the literal keys multiple times, leaving more potential for typos and sneaky bugs. You need to check each key's existence separately from checking its value. What a mess. I kept this example as simple as I could while maintaining a perfectly equivalent logical flow to the match example in the article, and keeping each if condition independent from others. In reality, if I had to use if/elif/else for this, I would use a fundamentally different structure, because this one sucks. I would probably split this into multiple if blocks, and capture the values into variables as early as possible to avoid using literal keys multiple times. This would add additional complexity. For example, I could check for the existence of the 'type' and 'username' keys first, before even starting this if statement, since every single case we use checks for them. But then what happens if I need to add more complex cases later that don't have all those same requirements? Better to keep each case independent -- or at least, it's better with the match statement, because it's designed to make that easy, efficient, safe, and readable. It's difficult to express the utility of the match statement with simple examples, because if/else is perfectly fine for those (always has been!). The simple examples don't really justify the complexity of adding a whole new type of statement block, but for advanced use cases, the advantage of match over if/elif/else widens significantly. There are even more complex and powerful things you can do with match. See https://peps.python.org/pep-0636/ for more details. More on reddit.com

How can we use Python's structural pattern matching (introduced in 3.10) to match the type of a variable without invoking the constructor / in a case where a new instantiation of the class is not e... More on stackoverflow.com

How many pythons does it take to operate a switch? More on reddit.com

I programmatically solved this in python 3.8, I'm excited to see how 3.10 simplifies this. Thanks for the post More on reddit.com