| :-) I feel you. I like to think that state machines are used where they are useful (in some games, process orchestration, generators, embedded systems, etc.). The question is more where else can they be useful given that the low hanging fruits have already been harvested. I am using state machines to write reactive applications: https://brucou.github.io/documentation/ So far I have to say that it is a mixed experience. There is a cost to the abstraction and the indirection (that is fairly well known easy to describe even if we rarely do so due to some self-imposed no-negativity bias or having some interest in the game), and then there are the benefits that are less easy to describe because they depend highly on the nature of the problem that you are addressing. I implemented a Medium clone application (https://codebase.show/projects/realworld) with state machines. The result is 47Kb (brought down to 39Kb after compiling the machine and other optimizations) vs. 70Kb for the Vue implementation or 160 KB for the React/Redux one (that implementation piles abstraction over abstraction in the form of libraries and pays the corresponding price). I would count that as benefit. Also cf. https://brucou.github.io/documentation/v1/tutorials/index.ht... for the full pitch. The high-level machine is that one: https://brucou.github.io/documentation/graphs/real-world/rea... At this level, you can follow the routing of the app. Every route is a compound state. If you open it, you see the details of the behavior. The full machine (post refactoring) is like this: https://brucou.github.io/documentation/graphs/real-world/rea... So one advantage is that with those graphs, it is easier to onboard new folks arriving to the codebase. They just have to follow arrows to know what the code is doing in response to a series of inputs. I could continue but with all that said, the Hyperapp implementation of the same application is 27Kb and also fairly simple (even if arguably not as simple) to get into. So there isn't a clear-cut ex-nihilo benefits to state machines here. In fact if you would have implemented the same application as a MPA instead of a SPA, for most, if not all of the pages, using a state machine to model the behavior is simply overkill. Most of the job and value of the machine in my example is to do the client-side routing done in the machine (so no extra library cost). Anyways the bottom line is the tool is useful but you have to figure for what, and where is the value maximized. The obvious cases have already been figured out. |
