alt Hacker News2 hours and not a single comment yet?! At one point, Statecharts seemed to be getting traction in the frontend/UI ecosystem, albeit tiny traction. Leveraging state machines (and particular Statecharts, which is basically compositions of state machines) for UI interactions makes complex flows so much easier to reason about! However, seems the traction eventually disappeared for unknown reasons, sadly.
If this is the first time you're hearing about Statecharts, I highly recommend the book "Constructing the user interface with statecharts" by Ian Horrucks (https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780201342789/mode/2up) which yes, is from 1999, but probably the best introduction for how to actually apply and use Statecharts.
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> Statecharts seemed to be getting traction in the frontend/UI ecosystem
Yes, I stumbled upon statecharts checking out this Godot plugin: https://github.com/derkork/godot-statecharts
Statecharts are still getting some traction! XState has over 4 million weekly npm downloads. Animation tools like Rive & LottieFiles heavily advertise state machine capabilities. AI tools like LangGraph are built on state machine foundations.
It'll take some time for those apps/tools to realize the full potential of statecharts, but it's a good start.