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My computer architecture professor had once told me, "building computers is an exercise in managing state." Over the years I've learned that this is an absolute
by kickingvegas 10y ago
My computer architecture professor had once told me, "building computers is an exercise in managing state." Over the years I've learned that this is an absolute truth. State machines are an effective abstraction in helping us reason about managing state. That said, I'm shocked at how many programmers I run into who haven't a clue about how state machines work.
- pron 10y agoIf you read a bit about TLA or abstract state machines, you'll see that the premise there isn't that state machines help us reason about state, but that every computational model is an abstract state machine, from Turing machines, through process calculi, to lambda calculus (LC is a nondeterministic abstract state machine; LC + an evaluation model is a deterministic state machine). TLA unifies state machine definitions with temporal logic, in order to create a mathematical formalization of abstract state machines and their properties, and hence a mathematical formalization of computation of any kind.