Hi,

I hope this is not too silly as a subject but I need your input, specially from native english speakers.

If you look at gen_fsm, you will see that the State is generally a short term, like open or close, while the term Data contains, well, the data of the FSM.
In a GenServer, the term state can be short but will often contain more than that, generally multiple maps, monitors, caches, etc. Since my beginnings in Erlang, I used to call state the representation of the data carried along in some process or group of functions.

Then there is the word status. In french, we have statut, which is a literal transaltion, and can be used to describe a single word representing a person status, like the facebook status “single” or “engaged” (don’t know the real english terms for facebook).

I am working with Java developers who use status to represent the full state of an entity, a system, etc. whereas state is generally implemented with a Java enum, like ONLINE, OFFLINE, etc. We extensively use both words and I am sometimes confused when I have to name things.

From my research it seems that they are right, and that state should be a short term like in gen_fsm, and status should be the more complex data structure.

So I would like the opinion of Erlang/Elixir developers because in those languages the state word is also used extensively to represent data structures.

Thanks!