|
I strongly agree that multiple ways to look at things is good. Programming languages have different "things" built in. Like, if you have re-entrant function calls, then your language has a built-in data structure called "the stack".
If you have some algorithm that needs a stack, you have the choice of using the built-in stack, or using an explicit stack. If you have a programming language with some sort of type system, then you have tagged data built-in. You can model your domain in the type system, or you can model your domain using a tuple like (tag, datablob). If you have object-oriented programming with dynamic (single) dispatch on the first argument, then your language somewhere has a built-in data structure called a table/dictionary/associative-array. If you want to implement some sort of switching behavior you can do a switch on the `tag`, or encode the tag in the type system, and use dynamic dispatch. Some programming languages have support for asynchronous calls. That programming language has a built-in scheduler of sorts. You can use it, or build your own, (or use the OS!). A state machine, I think, is a great example of the same idea. Your CPU has a bunch of state (e.g. the program counter), and your programming languages has a bunch more state (like the current stack frame, the line number). You can encode your state machine in that, or you can model it explicitly. How well you can do it "implicitly" depends on other language features, like whether you have coroutines. I think it's challenging, without expertise that might come only from having solved an identical problem already, to know ahead of time when to use these built-in things or roll your own. When you mention testing, I think that's a great example of expertise you've acquired. If you would like to test certain invariants in your state machine, e.g. "a transition from A to B never happens", then you're going to have a hard time doing so if your state machine's state is encoded in the line number of your language interpreter or the program counter, or whatever. |