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The argument is not that state machines are the child of FP, just that a common idiom in FP, Pattern Matching over ADTs, makes them easy to implement.



This might be, but state machines are so common in imperative code, you could say they are common idiom there also. Pattern matching over ADTs only drives transitions; different representation of transitions can lead to different constructs being more convenient (e.g. if your transitions are just based on a finite set of values, you can use just dictionaries).


That could very well be. My brain tends to map problems to ADTs with very low friction.




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