>Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit.
>MVC was originally done at PARC almost 40 years ago. The good part was philosophical -- the idea to adapt the notion of "cameras" and "worlds" in the original 3D graphics stuff I participated in at Utah 45 years ago. The bad part of MVC was how we implemented it -- much too much machinery, etc.
>We (my various groups since then, including Viewpoints Research) have not thought about MVC since, but have used and devised various viewing methods over the last 20+ years. I like to do views as "watchers" which do not affect what they are viewing. There are lots of ways to do this. Similarly, I like to also use "watchers" (context sensitive to the views) to catch needed inputs. We have never done a really satisfactory automatic inverter for dealing with the loss of "dimensions" that happen when a view is made (but we have done some experimental ones).
>One important criterion is for end-users of all kinds to be able to easily make their own views in a very powerful ad hoc way via construction. We have done a number of adaptations and generalizations of how this can be done in Hypercard -- and this seems to work well (enough).
>Since we always roll our own languages and development systems, we don't care about problems that other systems might have. For example, we have very little knowledge about C#, etc. We do try to learn from the few good systems that are out there.
that also rings true, as someone who has had to deal with mvc in various forms; its all so complicated, and views as watchers is exactly what i'd want
slight digression, but i feel like alot of the want for using llms for coding is because people are tired of dealing with all the complexity of implementing things that should be simple and easy; like llms are a crutch for complexity we are drowning in and people just want to "throw it at the llm" and be done with it...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
>I asked Alan Kay about his thoughts on MVC:
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>From: Alan Kay
>Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit.
>MVC was originally done at PARC almost 40 years ago. The good part was philosophical -- the idea to adapt the notion of "cameras" and "worlds" in the original 3D graphics stuff I participated in at Utah 45 years ago. The bad part of MVC was how we implemented it -- much too much machinery, etc.
>We (my various groups since then, including Viewpoints Research) have not thought about MVC since, but have used and devised various viewing methods over the last 20+ years. I like to do views as "watchers" which do not affect what they are viewing. There are lots of ways to do this. Similarly, I like to also use "watchers" (context sensitive to the views) to catch needed inputs. We have never done a really satisfactory automatic inverter for dealing with the loss of "dimensions" that happen when a view is made (but we have done some experimental ones).
>One important criterion is for end-users of all kinds to be able to easily make their own views in a very powerful ad hoc way via construction. We have done a number of adaptations and generalizations of how this can be done in Hypercard -- and this seems to work well (enough).
>Since we always roll our own languages and development systems, we don't care about problems that other systems might have. For example, we have very little knowledge about C#, etc. We do try to learn from the few good systems that are out there.
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