Steven H. Rogers wrote to me the other day and let me know that the J programming language has state machines as part of its native syntax. Steven said, "J tends to look like line noise, but it's quite powerful." Judging from the J website, I'd have to agree on both counts. It seems like a very high-level programming language, quite suitable for a number of disciplines. Some of the success stories on the web site talk about it being a good replacement for APL (which people also say looks like line noise). In any case, many of the success stories sound like Lisp success stories: high level programming language saves time, money, the world, etc...

No wonder I had never heard of it...