A FSM is simply a structure that progresses over time, where the next state is dependent on the previous state. By your usage of “goto,” I feel like you’re impl

A FSM is simply a structure that progresses over time, where the next state is dependent on the previous state. By your usage of “goto,” I feel like you’re implying like this is a negative thing. But state is an inherent part of computation. A Turing Machine can be seen as a slightly more powerful state machine, and most if not all of the code that we write can be easily modeled with the less powerful state machine. And no, functional programming does not actually help this.