Inspiration from finite state machines for no code tools(laudspeaker.com)
laudspeaker.com
Inspiration from finite state machines for no code tools
https://laudspeaker.com/docs/engineering-blog/inspiration-from-finite-state-machines-for-no-code-tools
2 comments
For a summary: "Visual editors are easy to use and popular, but often lack clear engineering principles in their design. There are a few options to choose from when modeling these editors, including Directed Acyclic Graphs and Finite State Machines, depending on the user requirements and how the entities you transact on are defined. In the case of Laudspeaker, the customer journey was modeled as a finite state machine, with customer actions/attributes as the base set of transitions and messaging steps as the various states."
It was interesting to think of a drag and drop editor as a visual programming language, but i suppose that makes sense. Given this view I wonder how powerful other no code tools are? Are some of them Turing machines?
I suspect some are much closer to simulating Turing machines than others. In theory, no automata can simulate a Turing machine unless it has access to unbounded (infinite) memory, which can't actually happen in the real world. If there's branching, for loops, and some proxy for memory like reusable registers, it can certainly approach a Turing machine. So maybe Zapier is? I don't recall many tools having a proxy for reusable memory though.