Any pointers/examples on using state charts? I've seen custom state machine compilers for tricky code (not limited to parser generators)... but I don't have mu

Any pointers/examples on using state charts? I've seen custom state machine compilers for tricky code (not limited to parser generators)... but I don't have much familiarity with the term "state charts". I find functional code goes a long way... a lot further than most people think. And then I try to capture all side effects in objects instantiated in main(). That makes them easy to isolate and scale later. I like some of their arguments about relational modeling vs. hierarchical modeling... not sure about the implications in my own code yet. Werner Vogels has a pithy headline "Life is not a State Machine"... I think too many people have yet to internalize that. An individual program is always a state machine, but a distributed system is not in general. You can force it to be one by using full Paxos everywhere, but that's limiting yourself to a very narrow subset of all possible distributed systems. So there is something fundamental about state machines and scaling. There is probably an impossibility result somewhere about this.