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You'd think that... I did both EE and CS undergrad (we didn't have Computer Engineering at the time). In EE we started talking about FSMs very early on, in qui

You'd think that... I did both EE and CS undergrad (we didn't have Computer Engineering at the time). In EE we started talking about FSMs very early on, in quite a bit of depth. In CS though, we didn't really talk about them until the Computability course in 3rd or 4th year, and even then it was in the very theoretical Finite Automata sense; applying FSMs to software design wasn't really a thing that was ever covered. From the EE material, I started loosely applying those concepts to software design, but it wasn't until my first job in industry where I was lucky enough to be exposed to a system that was very deliberately designed as a system of FSMs. We based the design of ours off of a pretty famous paper, whose name is entirely escaping me at the moment. Damn.

matthewwiese 9y ago
Are you thinking of Harel's paper "On Visual Formalisms"? http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/SCANNED.PAPERS/VisualFormalisms.pdf http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~harel/SCANNED.PAPERS/Visua... I'm curious to know what famous paper it is so that I can go and read it!
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  That wasn't it... but this also looks super interesting. I emailed the mentor who first introduced me to it to see if he remembers what it was called. Watch this space!
Serow225 9y ago
Slightly offtopic, but I grew up in Regina and went to college at the U of S :)
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  I was in Saskatoon for a long time. Undergrad 2002-2007 (EE+CS), CS MSc 2009-2015ish (ran out of funding, ended up contracting a bunch). Any chance we crossed paths?