""State" and "persistence" are crucial "terms of art"
for computing. They are concepts that arise throughout computing,
but have meanings hard to understand from outside the domain.
Clarity about these is essential for a developer of modern
distributed applications.
"In general, "state" refers to information about the current
conditions of program execution—runtime data stored in
memory. "Persistence," by contrast, refers to keeping data between
one program execution and another. In a program which iterates
through a table in a database, the database itself is "persistent,"
but the information about which row is being displayed is
"state.""