Re:The UML crowd discovers finite state automata (Score 1)

I wasn't attacking you on an ad hominem basis, merely hypothesizing that sometimes the industry community gets hot and bothered over ideas that are old hat in academic computer science

Sorry -- I didn't mean to go off on you or anyone in particular, and I understood your comments in the non-personal context.

I am no 'statechart-does-everything' zealot, but I've found even among CS educated people, that they tend to dismiss things because the value is not immediately obvious, especially as I infer from you, when there aren't some good examples to drive the points home. In that regard, both Horrocks and Samek show some good real world examples (Horrocks - design flaws in the Microsoft Windows calculator, Samek - the Therac-25 medical device that killed people as a result of design flaws in the capturing of machine state).

I agree with you completely that there is nothing magical about a statechart. I think Samek's point is exactly that -- too often, statecharts are seen in association with expensive tools, and so the message is that you need an expensive tool to work with them. Samek argues that statecharts will have their greatest value as a developer-empowering design methodology, not the output of a code generation program for the high-level user. I think the tool companies too often try to sell it to high-level people rather than get down and dirty and explain how statecharts can help the low-level developers.

I also agree with you that this is not new or innovative -- it has been around for almost 20 years! Still, however, many developers haven't heard about them or have dismissed them outright because of lack of knowledge. Yet programs today routinely are HUGE and have life cycles easily of years if not decades. With big pressures on developers to meet deadlines, less emphasis is placed on design for longevity, and future developers (and users) will suffer.

-jonathan