Fair! I think we just have different perspectives. HN is enormously complex (it has far more complexity than most people realize or truly appreciate), yet it handles every case without any state machine: https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc

And it's nothing but a long list of functions that use closures.

I did take a look at your examples. I just ... well, we'll have to agree to disagree, and I'll try not to be so harsh in my criticisms of what I perceive to be ugly ideas. Just because I think an idea is bad, doesn't mean it's bad.

But there is one specific critique: the state machine approach will make programs longer, and consciously choosing to make programs longer seems fraught with danger. Every additional character you type is an additional character for bugs to hide in.

This moves the subjective "I don't like the style" to something concrete: What's the shortest program you can write with a state machine? My argument is that it's "significantly longer than the equivalent program without a state machine."