I think maybe "coming to the mainstream" fits better. I too saw it in Ada in school, and of course Haskell and friends have had them for ages.
There does seem to be recent trend of popular, highly visible languages that are adding the feature though. I think the biggest thing though is really that the pattern matching syntax that makes them so easy to use is becoming more common.
You can have Sum types without pattern matching, and vice versa, but it seems to be much more common now to expect any new language to include pattern matching.
There does seem to be recent trend of popular, highly visible languages that are adding the feature though. I think the biggest thing though is really that the pattern matching syntax that makes them so easy to use is becoming more common.
You can have Sum types without pattern matching, and vice versa, but it seems to be much more common now to expect any new language to include pattern matching.