[taeric]

For the life of me, I can't read your complaints as actual complaints, but endorsements of the idea.

I haven't done it, yet, but I am tempted to make everyone I work with draft out the state machine of everything we are working with in our systems. I'm half convinced the worst bugs we have, are when folks didn't realize that the change they were doing required modifications because of how far reaching they were in the state of the system.

I take a simple vending machine as a good thought exercise. If you are just changing the system that recognizes coins, you can easily localize your changes. If you are changing the system that accepts coins...

[candiodari]

This.

How much of the anti-formalism attitude is about real difficulties of the method, and how much is about "I don't know this method, so it must be bad".

Code, regardless of what it does, is a state machine. That does not change whether you do it intentionally or not. And if you don't use state machine design tools to design them ... then your state machine becomes a huge mess with transitions going from everywhere to everywhere and very surprising connections in many places (and most/all of those will be bugs, bugs that no unit test ever is going to find).

Which seems to be acceptable for a lot of people.