Thinking about banning the use of IF-THEN-ELSE... https://guitarvydas.github.io/2024/05/02/Banning-the-Use-of-IF-THEN-ELSE.html

Have you ever played with SNOBOL, Icon, Prolog, or the amb operator in a language with continuations like Scheme or Ruby? Those are some other contexts in which you might find inspiration for ways to use backtracking instead of explicit conditionals.

Term rewriting is another approach that doesn't require branching, nor any explicit control flow (though there are rules for control flow, behind the scenes).

case/pattern matching/recursion and state machine/event/transition are the two alternatives I've been playing with

See the schematic tables introduced in Subtext 2 by @jonathoda: https://www.subtext-lang.org/OOPSLA07.pdf, https://vimeo.com/140738254