to dabbling in the then-current neoliberal thought which Foucault encountered while teaching in California in the 1970s. He liked the idea of busting down the welfare state, which he believed had created dependent, docile subjects. He heretically supported both the conservative French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the Iranian revolution, while denouncing the dirigisme of the French communist and socialist parties. He had more in common with Thatcher and Reagan than Mitterrand.

You may communicate more than a binary outcome of an activity. For instance, a controller endpoint activity could have end events for success and failure, but also for “not authorized”, or “validation failed”. You’re not limited to a binary setup here.

A nested activity doesn’t have to have two ends, only.

Adding ends to an activity is a beautiful way to communicate more than two outcomes to the outer world without having to use a state field in the ctx. It also allows wiring those outcomes to different tracks in the container activity.

Using a terminus to indicate a certain outcome - in turn - allows for much stronger interfaces across nested activities and less guessing! For example, in the new endpoint gem, the not_found terminus is then wired to a special “404 track” that handles the case of “model not found”. The beautiful thing here is: there is no guessing by inspecting ctx[:model] or the like - the not_found end has only one meaning!

A major improvement here is the ability to maintain more than two explicit termini. In 2.0, you had the success and the failure termini (or “ends” as we used to call them). Now, additional ends such as not_found can be leveraged to communicate a non-binary outcome of your activity or operation.