3 ms·

> Funny thing... MVC is a pattern for GUIs (Windows and Mac desktop applications). Errm, it's a pattern often used for UI (CLI and GUI) programming that was fi

> Funny thing... MVC is a pattern for GUIs (Windows and Mac desktop applications). Errm, it's a pattern often used for UI (CLI and GUI) programming that was first commercially introduced in Smalltalk-76 (in 1976). [This predates Windows and Mac by many years.] MVC can be done -with varying degrees of difficulty- in any computer language. You don't even need a web development framework to implement it! ;-)

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it can be done well. iOS/OS X seems to do real MVC, with lightweight reusable view objects managed by ready-made controller classes. The obvious benefits are minimal memory and streamlined data flow. You only ever make/use the view objects you really need, you can recycle them to save memory, and - in OS X especially - controller objects include useful ready-made convenience methods. Web frameworks often seem to do something that looks like MVC if you squint and don't think too hard. But when you're forced to use separate languages for logic (js), markup (HTML), and view design (CSS), and handle separate client/server environments, and there's inevitable overlap between all of the above (jquery etc) because stuff doesn't "just work", and you probably have yet another layer as a DB driver, it gets very complicated very quickly - to no great benefit. The web has become a snarly ball of warty epicycles. That's why native is so popular - you get one common language for logic, views, and data, with a clean-ish interface to a remote server if you need one. When everything works together like that, you can think seriously about MVC. When the core concerns are all over the place already, it's a mess before you even start. Which is not to say you can't work with it and build cool stuff - more that you can't just airdrop in a design pattern from a different tradition without thinking really, really hard about what, why, how, and what happens a year from now.

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

Just because it can be done, doesn't mean it can be done well. iOS/OS X seems to do real MVC, with lightweight reusable view objects managed by ready-made controller classes. The obvious benefits are minimal memory and streamlined data flow. You only ever make/use the view objects you really need, you can recycle them to save memory, and - in OS X especially - controller objects include useful ready-made convenience methods. Web frameworks often seem to do something that looks like MVC if you squint and don't think too hard. But when you're forced to use separate languages for logic (js), markup (HTML), and view design (CSS), and handle separate client/server environments, and there's inevitable overlap between all of the above (jquery etc) because stuff doesn't "just work", and you probably have yet another layer as a DB driver, it gets very complicated very quickly - to no great benefit. The web has become a snarly ball of warty epicycles. That's why native is so popular - you get one common language for logic, views, and data, with a clean-ish interface to a remote server if you need one. When everything works together like that, you can think seriously about MVC. When the core concerns are all over the place already, it's a mess before you even start. Which is not to say you can't work with it and build cool stuff - more that you can't just airdrop in a design pattern from a different tradition without thinking really, really hard about what, why, how, and what happens a year from now.