MVC Isn’t MVC

Just going to leave this here:

"There is a View, which only knows how to tell you something. There is a Controller, which only knows how to manipulate something.

This is a crack team of a quadriplegic and a blind man, each in separate rooms, and you have to delegate your UI to them? How, in the name of all that is holy, are you supposed to do that? Prisoner dilemmas and trolleys? No really, if the View is a TextField, with a keyboard cursor, and mouse selection, and scrolling, and Japanese, how is it possible to edit the model backing it unless you are privy to all that same information? What if it's a map or a spreadsheet? ばか!

This implies either one of two things. First, that the Controller has to be specialized for the target widget. It's a TextController, with its own house key to the TextView, not pictured. Or second, that the Controller doesn't do anything useful at all, it's the View that's doing all the heavy lifting, the Controller is just a fancy setter. The TextModel certainly isn't supposed to contain anything View-specific, or it wouldn't be MVC.

Wikipedia does helpfully tell us that "Particular MVC architectures can vary significantly from the traditional description here." but I would argue the description is complete and utter nonsense. Image-googling MVC is however a fun exercise for all the zany diagrams you get back. It's a puzzle to figure out if any two actually describe the same thing."

https://acko.net/blog/model-view-catharsis/

MVC is a cargo cult, and at the end of the day separating your view from your controller isn't going to accomplish anything if the code can't be easily upgraded to multiplayer with undo/redo, which is what users want.

I feel interactions between multiple objects is more complicated than looping over SQL query results, ORM logic or object graph traversal logic.

Arbitrary message passing between objects is like an N-way network of communication. The number of participants in an object graph increases the complexity of OOP systems. Kind of like a distributed system since every object is in a different state.

Yes absolutely. Reenskaug has stated that MVC was designed for simple operations (and co-designed DCI as an architecture for more complicated ones). And a number of the early OOP people including Alan Kay, have said something to the effect of “Erlang is the only true OOP language.”

I did a deep dive reading the early papers and watching the lectures from the 70s, 80s and 90s on this a few months ago. The early Xerox employees developing smalltalk seem to have originally thought the idea of encapsulation would compose at all levels. That as object interaction got more complicated, you would simply group a few related objects together inside a larger object, and the rest of the application would use that encapsulating objects interface, and you could go infinitely deep that way while managing the complexity. Later, in the 80s, Kay would talk an about writing objects in smalltalk then gluing them together with a glue language (usually Mesa C), because he felt smalltalk worked well for programming in the small but not the large.

Again, I think erlang got a lot right here, using a different model for programming the small (functional) vs programming in the large (actors/otp).

But to hear the OOP pioneers talk about objects, they consistently describe the objects not in terms of data but in terms of behavior, similar to Erlang actors being processes. Each object is supposed to represent a “computer” and the network of objects is supposed to work like a distributed system.

I know which mental model I like better, but objectively, it’s a very different concept from what most developers think of as OOP today (although very similar to microservices).

Actually let me share a story :

I usually never ever advise my customers to rewrite their app from scratch. And yet here i was, doing it for the 4th time in a row for 4 different customers, in just 2 years, simply because the codebase were a total mess each time.

So i thought "well, there's got to be a problem with iOS developers here in Paris". And so i decided to give a talk to the largest iOS dev group in Paris to show my model layer template.

I started with a poll : who has ever heard about "layered architectures" ?

Well, there was about 100 people in the room, and only 2 people raised their hands. I talked to them afterwards, they were both backend developers originally, and were absolutely stunned nobody else in the room knew the term.

So, that was just to tell you that the problem is a cultural one. Apple never ever mentions architecture in their documents / talks. So most mobile devs that start in this path start by coding fancy animations, and only much MUCH later, after a lot of projects turned ugly, do they start to realize there is another world for them to discover.

> To get anal

Buy them a very nice dinner, at least.