On: Why Developers Never Use State Machines (2011)

[RobLach]

If you've ever do any game programming you'll be drowning in state machines.

[taneq → RobLach]

Or control systems (which is remarkably similar to game programming, really). Basically anything that needs to model on control a system which changes state over time. Sometimes it gets a bit too much, though, and people start seeing every task as a nail for a state-machine hammer.

[AstralStorm → taneq]

Any such state model is not the actual thing it models (which is almost always stateless continuous time) therefore extremely annoying to work with. Also a source of bugs and concurrency issues.

[signa11 → RobLach]

network protocol as well, hell, any non-toy network application ends up containing a state machine either implicitly or explicitly

[mozumder → signa11]

VHDL/Verilog as well, but that's completely obvious.

I've been using state machines for Javascript UI elements.. really simplifies things.

[escapecharacter → signa11]

Gesture detection/interaction here. All state machines all the time.

[eeks → escapecharacter]

Life cycle management, process synchronization, lockfree data structure, user-space networking... I can't remember the last time I didn't use a state machine.

[duxup → signa11]

As someone who troubleshot networking issues for years, god bless you.

[yoz-y → RobLach]

This. When I was learning to code by making games I was making state machines without even knowing the definition.