On Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003, at 06:28 US/Pacific, Ovid wrote: [..] hi ovid, et al,
let me first start with a bit of Dan Akroyd of SNL fame,
"Ovid, you spawn of a hairless ape...."
The good news seems to be that we DO agree that a root cause analysis of the 'MVC as meme' can be laid four square upon the 'Gang of Four' - as you call them, and were I not lazy I would actually haul down their tome and cite the ISBN....
[..]
if people are learning about MVC from the discussion on this list, it is probably a good thing that they know a bit of the history of said pattern rather than assume that it was coughed up from the void fully formed in the way that it's being discussed on this list.
But I am soooo not sure that the history will help the discussion, in part, since the 'meme' has drifted and gained a sense of orthodoxy all out of proportion to the underlying argument as you note with:
I am not saying that the GoF presented the only correct view of how MVC should work (in fact, I object to a common interpretation that DP can only be used for OO languages). However, the original point of Design Patterns (the architectural ones preceeding the programmatic ones) was to give people a common vocabulary so they can discuss a situation and know what each other is talking about.
A part of that problem is the presumption that 'OO' provides some mystico-religious solution that is inherent in the 'language' rather than that the ideas have been implemented 'better' or 'worser' in this or that 'programming language'...
Which of course is the Really Comical tid-bit in the midst of a kvetching
about PHP v. Perl....
Unfortunately, at this point in history, I fear you are being a bit optomistic that "Design Patterns" were intent upon providing a common 'vocabulary' - as much as to generate buzz, and from that buzz to 'sell product' that 'implemented' a given variation of the meme in drift...
While I may be merely being pessimistic in my interpretation.
We do at least agree that the myth of legend is that the intention was to produce UML - the Universal Modelling Language - and that it would provide the one true, formal, and applicable language in which the TrueBelievers were going to build the great Tower of Babel based upon the correct implementation of the MVC Design Pattern...
{ this might not be the polite point in the chat to note that
'design pattern' is a buzzPhrase ripped off from other fields
of human endeavor outside of the 'computing world'... and that
the hope underneath the UML/MVC, Design Pattern, et al, was that
we would successfully replicate the 19th Century Notion of the
Factory System in the information age... but that way may be
a bit more unpleasantly complex in its relationships than we
would prefer to cover here... }[..]
If the people on this list are handed a version of MVC for the Web and have no idea of the history and origins of said pattern, then someone who only knows it from the GoF description is going to have a very confused conversation with someone who doesn't know the GoF description.
Which of course is the Ultimate Irony of the whole FREAKING Problem.
If a 'design pattern' were suppose to be the portable intellectual abstraction of a given 'class of problem' - independent of the actual underlying implementation specific details - then the fact that we have two groups who come to the same 'design pattern' and lose the ability to talk about what is merely an abstraction because of the differences in the underlying implementation specific details leads me to wonder if the vary concept of a 'design pattern' was, well, 'weak' and/or 'lame' to begin with.... Hence my concern that it was merely 'marketting speak' to bring in new converts to the cooler cult... rather than finding "God's True Divine Will"....
No either description is necessarily good or bad, but they have[..]
significantly different implementations and that's an important difference.
The question then becomes can 'abstract ideas' be ported around from system to system? Anyone who has dealt with say Java's
try{}throw{}catch{}
structure of course has the giggle moment in the discussions
about the differences between ErrorClasses and ExceptionClasses,
since, well, it's not too clear how to manage the ErrorClassForCoreDump....
Yet, we have seen things like FatalToBrowsers provide a way to
'catch' the 'die' that was 'thrown'....{ or should we have said
that 'the die is cast....' }So either we can decide that a 'meme' in it's original intention, such as the MVC Design Pattern, is worth at least knowing about and working out how best to use the 'best practices' that it attempts to establish - or we should follow the 'meme drift' and decide that Perl Is Dead, because
NewCoolerCodingFooIsTheWave
So I will fully support you in the war against 'meme drift' since good ideas remain good ideas, even if they are not as easy to implement in any given coding language...
and of course, as we all know from the hot buzz 'meme drift du jure'
Anything Less and the Terrorists Win!!!
any questions?
ciao drieux
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