I'm not exactly very well acquainted with the theoretical underpinnings of Computer Science (except where they intersect with other fields that are more my specialty like Operations Research and Economics), but Finite State Machines have always struck me as incredibly intuitive modeling structures for thousands of real life phenomenon. And I'm continuously surprised that professional SDEs with academic training in CS are so reluctant to use them to model their domains. I realize that avoiding state has its benefits in a lot of areas of software design, but the world is stateful and if you are avoiding state just to make your job easier, you are doing it wrong.

One area that absolutely baffles me is UI Framework design. Every single UI in the world can be modeled as an FSM because they are FSMs. And yet, when you go to any common framework for UI design, you are forced to use concepts that only tangentially touch the idea of modeling a UI as an FSM. And while the new breed of Reactive Functional Programming approaches have incredibly useful concepts (like reducers and signals), they still require incredibly imperative approaches to state transitions.

And unfortunately the worst part of web design is the language. Javascript is terrible for modeling FSMs: recursion is an afterthought, state can be so shapeless and dynamic to the point where you need to query your state to be able to identify where you are in it, and listening to events is a chore of epic proportions. The closest that I've found to actual FSM design on the web has been React.js, and even then it only seems like they accidentally stumbled onto the idea of using FSMs to model UIs. The state of the art in modeling state in React (Redux) eschews component local state religiously, forcing you towards modeling every possible DOM event through a gigantic global structure. It ends up being a gigantic pain in the ass.

I really wish I could find a cross platform UI framework with a true FSM approach to modeling UIs. It doesn't need to be complicated: All you need is a component model and you program a component by describing each component's state transition table (state0 * event=> action * state1), and the mapping of the state to its immutable and pure renderer. There literally is nothing more to it than that. Some day I'm just gonna lose my shit enough to compel me to write my own framework and model it correctly. Until then, I'm gonna bitch about it on the internet.