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Coding is very personal and fashion driven. Everyone's brain work different. It's all random events that forms our thinking. A software project is too big when you can no longer see the full picture - then you should break it down to independent parts. State is your enemy.

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State is not the enemy.

Encapsulated and managed state is just fine.

Yeah but they're a statistical anomaly in the field.

For every example of encapsulated state, there's probably 9 more examples of global state which is called encapsulated.

And what is managed state? I can think of two examples that can effectively manage it - software transactional memory, and a good rdbms with the isolation level turned way up.

It's not that easy, say for example if a over excited user clicks the purchase button 20 times, ending up in 20 simultaneous orders. What is the best way to handle it? Should the user get 20 orders shipped to him, or only one? And should the user get a message that says "order already processed" or "order processed successfully"? You can have a system that works correctly 99% of the time. The devil is in the 1% of time when things go wrong.

Or alternatively, download more brain.

Yeah, this is big brain time.

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