> It sounds like payments might be part of the larger concept of declarative programming (DP) Yes, exactly! The idea with TigerBeetle's state machine [1] is to

> It sounds like payments might be part of the larger concept of declarative programming (DP) Yes, exactly! The idea with TigerBeetle's state machine [1] is to expose double-entry accounting as a higher level financial primitive, so that developers can think in terms of declaring transfers from one account to another. The business logic behind the scenes is detailed. The interfaces and data structures are simple. [1] https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/state_machine.zig#L331-L406 https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/state_ma... > Maybe TigerBeetle could be generalized to support any multi-step distributed process? That's part of the plan—that the distributed database framework of TigerBeetle can be used as an ”Iron Man suit” to support any kind of state machine, with high availability and fault tolerance.