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Woah — with all the declarative and functional languages, looks like someone has just discovered a (stateful) state machine. They’re trying to convince us that this is a useful thing in a hypothetical situation where people do ridiculous, unsafe things on an ad-hoc basis. Not sure I’m buying it.

Oh, wrong universe.

Edit:

I use state, too. I get it. I just dislike it. It doesn’t usually compose and is rarely safe.

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It is not hard to argue that several FP abstractions are basically state machines themselves, their transition function is simply recursively defined.

For a trivial example, objects defining the Applicable trait.

Which abstractions?

I could see a monad being defined as a list of (typed) states with a functor. But they’re still stateless.

I could also see immutable data structures being implemented in a stateful way (they usually are in non-FP languages).

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