"If there is one pattern this book couldn’t live without, this is it. Game loops are the quintessential example of a "game programming pattern". Almost every game has one, no two are exactly alike, and relatively few programs outside of games use them."

I've borrowed many of the game loop and other game programming principles when developing code for controlling external equipment like robots and radio transceivers. It's a better model than some of the crazy state machine code I'd written in the past.