alt Hacker News> I'd still like to hear about the actual mechanism of this happening
I am not an expert on this, but the worst API I've seen is those with hidden states.
e.g. .toggle() API. Call it old number of times, it goes to one state, call it even number of times, it goes back.
And there's call A before you call B types of APIs, the client has to keep a strict call order (which itself is a state machine of some kind)
> I am not an expert on this, but the worst API I've seen is those with hidden states.
> e.g. .toggle() API. Call it old number of times, it goes to one state, call it even number of times, it goes back.
This is literally a dumb light switch. If you have trouble proving that, starting from lights off, flicking a simple switch twice will still keep lights off then, well, I have bad news to tell you about the feasibility of using the formal methods for anything more complex than a dumb light switch. Because the rest of the world is a very complex and stateful place.
> (which itself is a state machine of some kind)
Yes? That's pretty much the raison d'être of the formal methods: for anything pure and immutable, normal intuition is usually more than enough; it's tracking the paths through enormous configuration spaces that our intuition has problem with. If the formal methods can't help with that with comparable amount of effort, then they are just not worth it.