Sum types are a huge benefit to branchy code. Philosophically, OOP polymorphism can do a similar thing, but it doesn't really cover it as succinctly: if your operation is of the "similar data, mostly the same algorithm but with variations at points depending on the data's type", going down the polymorphic route requires a lot more naming of things to cover each variation, and then when you go to inspect it, the code is twisty and jumps all over the place. I've had a lot of bugs introduced by method boundaries obscuring the execution flow.
What polymorphism is good at is building the black box, the soft boundaries, and that isn't a good thing to do for fine-grained details. I do occasionally find a use for extension, but it's at a scale closer to "call this entire subprogram as a kind of state machine", vs "write this algorithm as a collaboration of objects abstracted away from each other".
The "alternate hard and soft layers"[0] pattern comes to mind: if what you really need is modularity, going towards full dynamism and reflection seems like a better choice than to try to extend everything statically, which creates a very large latency issue(the default response to every form of change in a static system is "recompile from the beginning, precompute all answers"). At the same time, it's not a good fit to have a vast codebase do everything dynamically since the comprehensibility and throughput suffer.
What polymorphism is good at is building the black box, the soft boundaries, and that isn't a good thing to do for fine-grained details. I do occasionally find a use for extension, but it's at a scale closer to "call this entire subprogram as a kind of state machine", vs "write this algorithm as a collaboration of objects abstracted away from each other".
The "alternate hard and soft layers"[0] pattern comes to mind: if what you really need is modularity, going towards full dynamism and reflection seems like a better choice than to try to extend everything statically, which creates a very large latency issue(the default response to every form of change in a static system is "recompile from the beginning, precompute all answers"). At the same time, it's not a good fit to have a vast codebase do everything dynamically since the comprehensibility and throughput suffer.
[0] http://wiki.c2.com/?AlternateHardAndSoftLayers