[Too]

Ooof, saw a team get hung up on modeling the application as a state machine once. No existing solution could support all the edge cases so they had to write a templated state machine engine first.. Yeah.. No surprise what happened to that later.

[steve_adams_86]

I think going state machines all the way down is almost always a mistake. I can maybe see using state machines to undergird some logic in an application, like… I don’t know, maybe you’ve got some authentication stuff you’d like to reliably model as states, and that’ll be fairly foundational. But if you then model authenticated and unauthenticated states as substates, then have further nested states representing the sort of scaffolding or actual features of the application… That’s a nightmare.

I’ve noticed some people are hesitant to compose state machines too, like using dumb states to execute smarter state machines such that you can localize complexity and isolate things better. Almost like people think it needs to be a monolithic machine in order to truly maintain safety?

In any case, like any pattern there’s plenty of room for abuse, haha. I am a pattern abuser myself, usually learning things the hard way.