[steve_adams_86]

I’m a big fan of temporal and xstate (xstate for UIs in particular) lately, but they both present a major issue in my mind. They provide excellent foundations to create very reliable software, but the tools and conventions they offer are hard to learn and to work with.

That is such a huge setback because virtually no one I work with is willing to learn these tools in order to write better software. Even people I think are very intelligent (certainly more so than I am) think they can write these kinds of tools themselves ad hoc, as needed. It simply isn’t true; it’s a bad idea almost all of the time.

If we could find some way to make these tools more intuitive and attractive to depend on, I think it could be literally transformative. I know similar tools are popular in more engineering-centred software, so it isn’t necessarily impossible. On the web and mobile software side at least, getting people to define their application states and flows with any rigour seems to be like asking someone to file their taxes and write an essay about it afterwards.

But I also get it. These tools are a lot to absorb. Sometimes it feels like they’re in the way. Though I’d argue that when they feel like they’re in the way, it’s often because you didn’t anticipate a workflow stage or application state and its absence in your mental model is making the tool hard to use because they simply won’t accommodate broken workflow or state models. That’s a good thing, and something we should want from our tools. It’s something many people love about Rust, for example. Yet again though, many feel as though Rust gets in the way as well.

[samsquire]

Thanks for your comment and thoughts.

I think this tech is harder to get started with than not using it and that's a problem you've noticed.

I played with temporal on my workstation and thought it was really interesting but it is more things to deploy and maintain in exchange for reliability and robustness.

I had the choice between using Rust or C recently, but because the domain was new to me I chose C to get it done faster. Rust definitely has a learning curve.