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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

love how xstate makes implicit state machines explicit with a time tested (one might say Lindy) format. badly/ad hoc defined state machines are the source of so many bugs - David has been banging this particular drum the entire time i've known him (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPoC-k7Rxwo&list=PLRvKvw42Rc...)

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I wonder if we could build better implicit state machines if we could more easily visualize our imperative code by annotating it with visualization hints and parsing the AST. Also easier to debug/step-through this way.

Then why not just make it explicit?

Having really good tracing/observability on an explicit state machine like Xstate would be such a great superpower.

“Any sufficiently complicated model class contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of a state machine.”

–a former colleague

“I don’t need a state machine library” - everyone when starting a new project

I came across this code from 2-years-ago-me today:

      {/* the fact that i'm doing this means I probably should have used x-state or something */}
      {stages.filter(Boolean).length > 1 && (
        <div>
          WARNING! More than one assumption is true! {JSON.stringify(stages)}
        </div>
      )}

One day I'll learn...

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