[cwingrav]

That does sound fun. Formal systems approaches and automata always seemed more applicable to embedded development. State machines, statecharts, etc always seemed like something I was using on my projects. However, I also felt like I was always writing loops and tests for why some bit wasn’t flipping or some event didn’t occur. That’s the frustrating part... reading and rereading manuals and scratching your head.

[segmondy]

Yup, exactly what you said. If you can define the system as a finite state machine do so, then define it. Much easier to reason about and if your state is correct you can have a high level of confidence on the robustness of your code.