MVC discussion going on

[Andreas Söderlund]

I joined an MVC discussion based on Trygves original ideas, but I've reached the lower limit of my energy/time ratio. If anyone else wants to give his/her angle on things, or just read it, here it is: https://www.infoq.com/articles/no-more-mvc-frameworks#theCommentsSection%23anch147122

/Andreas

[James O Coplien]

On 19 Apr 2017, at 15.37, Andreas Söderlund <gaz...@gmail.com> wrote:

I joined an MVC discussion based on Trygves original ideas,

I’ve concluded that I do not understand Trygve’s original ideas, so will opt out.

[Matthew Browne]

What led you to that conclusion?

[Quang]

He answered this for his users and his developer fellows too. 

"So again, today no one (users or developers) can think in terms of "views", or "model""

So no need to argue with him then :)

What I learn from MVC and DCI is to talk to people, that is all :)

/quang

[Trygve Reenskaug]

Alan Kay used to complain: "Nobody understands me". He created something he called "object-orientation". I wonder how many have really grokked it? I wonder if it could form a foundation that simplified the front end/back end problems? My mental model of computing is object-oriented:
  
Alan Kay: The Early History Of Smalltalk:

Abstract
Most ideas come from previous ideas. The sixties, particularly in the ARPA community, gave rise to a host of notions about "human-computer symbiosis" through interactive time-shared computers, graphics screens and pointing devices. Advanced computer languages were invented to simulate complex systems such as oil refineries and semi-intelligent behavior. The soon-to-follow paradigm shift of modern personal computing, overlapping window interfaces, and object-oriented design came from seeing the work of the sixties as something more than a "better old thing." This is, more than a better way: to do mainframe computing; for end-users to invoke functionality; to make data structures more abstract. Instead the promise of exponential growth in computing/$/volume demanded that the sixties be regarded as "almost a new thing" and to find out what the actual "new things" might be. For example, one would compute with a handheld "Dynabook" in a way that would not be possible on a shared mainframe; millions of potential users meant that the user interface would have to become a learning environment along the lines of Montessori and Bruner; and needs for large scope, reduction in complexity, and end-user literacy would require that data and control structures be done away with in favor of a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior.

Early Smalltalk was the first complete realization of these new points of view as parented by its many predecessors in hardware, language and user interface design. It became the exemplar of the new computing, in part, because we were actually trying for a qualitative shift in belief structures—a new Kuhnian paradigm in the same spirit as the invention of the printing press—and thus took highly extreme positions which almost forced these new styles to be invented.
--------------------------------------------------------
Smalltalk's design—and existence—is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages. Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that some of them act as idealizations of concepts—Ideas—from which manifestations can be created. That the Ideas are themselves manifestations (of the Idea-Idea) and that the Idea-Idea is a-kind-of Manifestation-Idea—which is a-kind-of itself, so that the system is completely self-describing— would have been appreciated by Plato as an extremely practical joke [Plato].

In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing "computer stuff" into things each less strong than the whole—like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages—each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computers all hooked together by a very fast network. Questions of concrete representation can thus be postponed almost indefinitely because we are mainly concerned that the computers behave appropriately, and are interested in particular strategies only if the results are off or come back too slowly.

Though it has noble ancestors indeed, Smalltalk's contribution is a new design paradigm—which I called object-oriented—for attacking large problems of the professional programmer, and making small ones possible for the novice user. Object-oriented design is a successful attempt to qualitatively improve the efficiency of modeling the ever more complex dynamic systems and user relationships made possible by the silicon explosion.

--Trygve
A very tired, very frustrated,  and very old man.
Nobody understands me

[Raoul Duke]

Trygve please email Alan and set up a visit to Viewpoints, and invite us to luncheon with you both there. I mean that seriously. I had lunch with Engelbart a decade or so ago and he was in a similar boat where it is hard to get people to grok or accept what you said, wrote, meant, hoped for. People run off to make money from twisted half assed misinterpretations of good ideas. You gotta meet with, stay in touch with, other people who tilt at windmills. Silicon Valley let alone the rest of the world has forgotten and trampled more honestly good ideas than one can shake a stick at. You should also hit up Mark Miller (hp, now google) et. al. who are ex Xanadu folks. If you need a couch to crash on for the visit you are welcome here :)  Also the SV Patterns Group. There's others too.

Ditto for Cope tho I suspect he's busy gallavanting around the globe to berate people at DDD conferences? (I mean that in all seriousness in a good way :-)

[Trygve Reenskaug]

Hi Raoul
Thank you for a constructive mail and you kind invitation. I'm afraid my traveling days are over and a visit to LA is not a realistic project. You are all welcome here, of course. Doug has stayed with us several times, so it is entirely practical.

It's 40 years since the "interim Dynabook" and the real Dynabook still hasn't happened. A meeting as you suggest could help get to grips with the problem. May be a merger between Alan's and my ideas will be interesting. In any case, I'll let you know as soon as I have something to show you.

--Trygve

On 20.04.2017 18:02, Raoul Duke wrote:

Trygve please email Alan and set up a visit to Viewpoints, and invite us to luncheon with you both there. I mean that seriously. I had lunch with Engelbart a decade or so ago and he was in a similar boat where it is hard to get people to grok or accept what you said, wrote, meant, hoped for. People run off to make money from twisted half assed misinterpretations of good ideas. You gotta meet with, stay in touch with, other people who tilt at windmills. Silicon Valley let alone the rest of the world has forgotten and trampled more honestly good ideas than one can shake a stick at. You should also hit up Mark Miller (hp, now google) et. al. who are ex Xanadu folks. If you need a couch to crash on for the visit you are welcome here :)  Also the SV Patterns Group. There's others too.

Ditto for Cope tho I suspect he's busy gallavanting around the globe to berate people at DDD conferences? (I mean that in all seriousness in a good way :-)

--

Norway                     Tel: (+47) 22 49 57 27

[Matthew Browne]

On 4/20/17 4:31 AM, Trygve Reenskaug wrote:
> Nobody understands me
Specifically regarding MVC, we have discussed previously how the
user-centric purpose of MVC - the human level - has been missed by the
programming community, which tends to miss the forest for the trees. But
there's another dimension to this, which is that the original MVC
literature was pretty sparse, leaving a lot of room for
misinterpretation and other people to fill the gap by writing
implementations, books, and articles that were misinformed or missed the
point entirely.

I don't know if this could have been prevented...to say that Trygve
should have anticipated this would be like saying that Isaac Newton
should have developed entire school curricula for his contributions to
physics and calculus to ensure that it was properly taught. And that's
not even considering questions of time, resources, assistance, and
publicity. And Trygve, I'm definitely sympathetic to your frustration,
since you have been so giving of your ideas and time, and made so many
great contributions to the community over the years.

Perhaps the most constructive observation I can make is this: it's easy
for things to get lost in translation between the philosophy and the
practical application. There is genuine interest in the big ideas here -
the human element. But technology is messy, and even those with a strong
commitment to the principles can go astray in the implementation. In the
future, I hope that more influential people with resources discover and
get excited about Trygve's ideas, and invest in teaching it properly in
their communities. But if we're fortunate enough for that to happen,
will the new courses in "original MVC" be Trygve's MVC or something
quite different despite the best intentions?

Bottom line: it's not exactly surprising that people misunderstand MVC
when it's up to the student to fill in enough gaps that even your
long-time collaborator (Cope) misses the point ;) But have we really
missed the point that much (not necessarily me but the veteran members
here), or are we on the right track and you're just frustrated?...

[Trygve Reenskaug]

You are on the right track and I'm just frustrated. Not because people don't understand MVC -- it can be realized in many different ways. But because people don't appear to understand how Alan Kay's O-O and hence DCI offers a path where the public can program for the connected society (including smart homes).

I'm also frustrated because my horrible 5 minute video refuses to be transformed into something acceptable.  I think its contents is now reasonable, but the entertainment value ...

[Trygve Reenskaug]

Raoul Duke,
It's nearly 3 years since you suggested I should meet with Alan Kay and the folks at Viewpoints.  It was a very good idea because I have long wanted a face-to-face met with Alan and the folks at Viewpoints. They might not have liked my ideas but they would certainty understand them and their implications. I didn't feel quite ready for such a meet and said I would let you know as soon as I had something to show you. (...and I'm too old for traveling)

I am now ready; a 60-page article for Springer's SoSym is at the typographers prior to publication. Its title is "Personal Programming and the Object Computer" that introduces Loke as a present-day variant of the Dynabook. Unfortunately, I see that Viewpoints has concluded its operations. A great loss to us all.

Much has happened in the field of computing over the past 3 years:

1. The problem of safety and privacy has grown to intolerable proportions. The current of way of programing is essentially unchanged from 1948  and need to be replaced by something better. The concept of objects looks promising. An object encapsulates state and behavior, and the encapsulation provides an inherent firewall.
   
   
2. Alan's object orientation can be applied to IoT and M2M collaboration: " a new design paradigm—which I called object-oriented—for attacking large problems of the professional programmer, and making small ones possible for the novice user ... its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computers all hooked together by a very fast network".  In an object system,  an execution takes the form of a flow of messages. It is crucial that the programmer explicitly specifies this flow to create a program.
   
   
3. Some of us still retain the dream of the Dynabook and programming for all. Technology is very different  today from the technology of the 70ies so an actual Dynabook will be different from the original. I present Loke as a present-day personal computer where communication is a first class citizen of programming.
   
   
4. IoT is growing by leaps and bounds. IoT can be seen as a universe of communicating objects, Smalltalk is a universe of communicating objects. My article describes how the two can be merged into a conceptual whole and demonstrates it with a proof-of-concept implementation.
   
   
5. The first two sentences in my article are "This article is dedicated to owners of an IoT, amateur programmers, popular science readers, and generally interested people. (Expert programmers may find papers and articles that are better tuned to their needs)". The reason for the parenthesis is that I propose a novel mental frame of reference. A mental frame of reference is deep-seated, usually subconscious, and very hard to change. So the more expert the reader, the harder it will be to internalize the article's simple ideas. (I just received an e-mail from a programmer who was struggling to grok MVC. He wrote "For a year or so a realized an important thing: is very hard for a person who has some experience to unlearn things. When I saw that Model from MVC comes from the idea of mental models was like an earthquake for me. So , for me was time to make a ‘tabula rasa’ and this take time.")
   

The article can be found in my Personal Programming home page: http://folk.uio.no/trygver/themes/Personal/pp-index.html.
My hope is that it will find at least one reader who understands the new frame of reference and will take up the challenge to create a usable Loke for personal programmers, educators, and others. (At 89, I'm too old to do it myself).

Best

--Trygve

On 20.04.2017 18:02, Raoul Duke wrote:

Trygve please email Alan and set up a visit to Viewpoints, and invite us to luncheon with you both there. I mean that seriously. I had lunch with Engelbart a decade or so ago and he was in a similar boat where it is hard to get people to grok or accept what you said, wrote, meant, hoped for. People run off to make money from twisted half assed misinterpretations of good ideas. You gotta meet with, stay in touch with, other people who tilt at windmills. Silicon Valley let alone the rest of the world has forgotten and trampled more honestly good ideas than one can shake a stick at. You should also hit up Mark Miller (hp, now google) et. al. who are ex Xanadu folks. If you need a couch to crash on for the visit you are welcome here :)  Also the SV Patterns Group. There's others too.

--

The essence of object orientation is that objects collaborate  to achieve a goal.
Trygve Reenskaug      mailto: try...@ifi.uio.no
Morgedalsvn. 5A       http://folk.uio.no/trygver/
N-0378 Oslo             http://fullOO.info
Norway                     Tel: (+47) 468 58 625