It's interesting that so few people can define, or fully explain, MVC. I wonder how the success rate would change if you defined "model," "view" and "controlle

It's interesting that so few people can define, or fully explain, MVC. I wonder how the success rate would change if you defined "model," "view" and "controller," and asked why developers might choose to organize projects in such a way. My guess is that most working developers would get the concept right away and might even be able to relate it to other named models we've seen--we might just all exist in a web bubble where MVC is trendy because of the levels of abstraction that exist in our common toolsets. Even Cobol's ancient "divisions" seem to have a similar organizational structure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Features http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Features) and so, I'm sure, did a lot of old-school, green screen terminal apps. Our computers are generally fast enough and our tools good enough for what we're asking them to do that we can often just define data models and user views fairly abstractly--index this, make that an input box rounded corners and indented text--and that we can often avoid delving into the low-level details of how data's stored or pixels laid out on the screen. I'm sure it would be possible to describe an operating system, or a video game engine, or a DBMS in terms of which sections of code model data, handle the meat-and-potatoes "business logic" and communicate with the outside world, but you'd probably need deeper layers of abstraction to actually plan how code would be organized. We also have enough fast memory that we can basically pass data from one level to another without issue and don't have to deal with abstraction-breaking optimizations like processing data while a disk head or spinning drum is in the right place or before an old video game system's tiny RAM chip is full. But I think programmers who worked with those kinds of systems could quickly jump into web and app development, and if they couldn't, it's probably not because they don't know what MVC stands for (although it's possible it's a useful proxy).