Isn't this how Operational Semantics works for describing formally a given programming language? You define what the state of execution of the program is made of, and how state transitions occur during one execution step.
Author here. Operational semantics are a way of "talking about" a programming language, whereas temporal programming is a way of expressing operational semantics more directly from within a programming language.
The wikipedia link describing it is overly arcane but here it is anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_semantics