I greatly enjoyed this post on Codinghorror.com, where Jeff Atwood talks about the MVC pattern. Needless to say, it would be pretty useless to reiterate what he says. However, one of the comments caught my eye:

I have to admit, as someone with more philosophical inclinations, I wonder whether the stated goal of totally separating content from representation is even a good idea. Certainly no graphic designer would sign on to that theory of the world, much less a philosophically inclined graphic designer. The world is not actually made up, ontologically, of objects whose logical value and whose representational value is totally separate—they are deeply intertwined.

I understand, of course, the practical benefits from doing such splitting. But I find it quite odd that computer people on the whole seem to think that this approach is a really elegant one. It’s an idea which anyone in the humanities would find amusingly bad, one whose limitations are going to be on display constantly (as an example, witness how much hacky-looking CSS one generally needs to use in order to take a given HTML structure that was set up for a given page appearance to actually make it look totally different).

Shmork on May 6, 2008 05:11 AM

Its an interesting complaint, one that I’m sure quite a few artists and designers would point out. But, it is not an applicable complaint about MVC, simply because, computers are not a microcosm of reality. Computers operate by logic; if this value is true, then do this action. His complaint, is in essence, “Well, yeah, but reality is not sorted like that! Why should computer programs be so inclined?”

Lets look at this from another point: that the world is not made up of objects that fall into the ontological framework of MVC. For the model, lets have it be any object, say, a beachball. The beachball has specific data attached to it, its appearance, texture, how much air is in it, and its point of location. The view, in MVC, corresponds to the different ways we can see the ball, for example, with our eyes. The controller, and this is important, corresponds to the laws of physics for reality. The laws of physics say that the ball is here, and moving in this direction, and thus, our eyes, see that, due to light bouncing off the ball(which again, is determined by the laws of physics.) The ball changes its position infinitesimally, just as the laws of physics insists it must.

That sounds like a perfect example of MVC to me. And in fact, I fail to see how philosophy enters such a debate. Even a philosopher that trusts in the laws of physics would agree that the MVC framework fits reality.

Then Shmork states that anyone in the humanities would find it laughably bad. I fail to see how that pertains to the application of MVC to the world… considering that the Humanities refers to one of three major sub-divisions for a liberal education, which includes such subjects as English, History, Languages, Philosophy, and Religion. How does History or Languages relate to the inapplicability of a logical model? Initially it sounds like a condemnation, but in reality, it has no relation to the arguments made against MVC!

I can understand, how initially, MVC may be confusing to some people, but when one studies it, it becomes apparent that it is a logical representation of the world, and it just so happens to help code organization and understanding.