I believe that IF-THEN-ELSE is too low-level and too ad-hoc.

IF-THEN-ELSE grew out of COND which was intended to represent conditional values of functions.

Programmers, though, extend the use of IF-THEN-ELSE by coupling it with variables to create ad-hoc, custom control-flow constructs.

The emergence of various map() functions and case-ing based on pattern-matching is a workaround for incrementally replacing use-cases of IF-THEN-ELSE.

Let’s just go all the way. Let’s use parsers to provide syntactic pattern-matching. That’s probably expressive enough. If not, we can add semantic and type-based pattern-matching.

Replace control-flow uses of IF-THEN-ELSE by a parse. Leave COND alone, for determining conditional values of functions, but, not for control flow.

Historically, it’s been a tough slog to build parsers, but, OhmJS (and PEG) make this task massively easier.