It's there with nil to begin with. A Maybe type without pattern matching is basically nil checking. Now if he had said I want some kind of pattern matching then I would get behind that.
Not what I said and I don't see why you make those choices mutually exclusive. You can have pattern matching without sum types and you can have sum types without pattern matching.
In fact Ruby's case/when statement is very limited form of pattern matching that can be put to great use with proper use of Structs and overloading of ===.
