Why Developers Never Use State Machines
A few months ago I saw a great little blog post about state machines on the Shopify blog. The message was that state machines are great and developers should use them more – given my recent experiences with state machines at CrowdHired, I could certainly agree with that. But it got me thinking, how many times in my developer career have I actually used a state machine (either separate library or even hand-rolled abstraction)? The answer is zero times – which surprised the hell out of me since state machines really are very useful. So I decided to engage in a bit of introspection and figure out why we tend to manage our "state" and "status" fields in an ad-hoc fashion rather than doing what is clearly called for. Read more...