Talking to some programmers the last year I was surprised that state machines was unknown. In embedded systems, and esp in HW design (FPGAs and ASICs) you have

Talking to some programmers the last year I was surprised that state machines was unknown. In embedded systems, and esp in HW design (FPGAs and ASICs) you have state machines everywhere controlling the behaviour of the data processing (the data plane) part of the design. I first started to really learn about finite state machines (FSMs) during compiler class. The parser in a compiler for example is a FSM. Tools like Bison generates FSMs based on state rules. And in general as programmers we write code to parse stuff all the time. So how can FSMs be unknown? I'm a bit baffled.