Wanted: state machines in the language

Our programming languages are often structured around the problem domain of compilers and the archaic (for most of us) task of converting things people understand to a thing the computer can execute.

Why don’t our languages have deeper support for the ways we reason about problem domains or the ways we struggle to reason. For example, why aren’t state machines and checking their sanity (or marking their unsoundness) a thing in pretty much any language?

The unhelpful answer is “because you can write a state machine in library code”. Which leads me to ask, why don’t we have popular state machine clones? Why is there no xUnit or Sinatra of state machines that is widely cloned to fresh and exciting languages?

The cynical answer is “because many programmers don’t want to think that hard”. The optimistic answer is that there’s room for someone to capture this problem space as well as xUnit did for programmer testing or Sinatra did for turning URL-like strings into method calls. You could be famous!

Adam Keys @therealadam