The Wonders of State

2025-07-18

I was deeply inspired by Harel's Statecharts paper and I recorded a reading of it https://guitarvydas.github.io/2023/11/27/Statecharts-Papers-We-Love-Video.html. I immediately understood it, due to my EE training.

Software people tend to think that "state" is bad. Electronics people don't hate "state" and are used to dealing with it from using ICs and asynchronous / parallel designs.

The 1972 Atari Pong circuit is much more asynchronous than anything I've seen in the software world. The trick appears to be to completely encapsulate state and to put "pins" ("ports") on it.

I think that we've entered a realm of distributed computing (e.g. "internet") and that hardware designers are better equipped for dealing with this reality.

See Also

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