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by arximboldi 3134 days ago
We were precisely talking about composition and now you say there is only one? I guess you are talking about small apps where you have small dedicated views?

That is a very narrow definition of MVC. I am talking of large interactive software with multiple views on large hierarchical data trees data with different levels of focus and granularity. The kind of software I am thinking of big programs like Photoshop, Premiere, an IDE, Ableton Live...

Disclaimer: I worked for Ableton for quite a 5 few years, and have spent most of my career building interactive software (I work as independent consultant now). Most of the software of that time and age is built around MVC. It kinda works, but as a lot of people in the industry building software of that size will tell you: scale brings the the pain. Because of composoability. In the C++ world, see also talks from Sean Parent--who worked on Photoshop--and is also a strong proponent of "value-based" approaches (he is a great source of inspiration for me). Sean claims that something like 70% of bugs in Photoshop are in UI-related code typical MVC wiring up stuff.

In the end, just pick the right tool for the job. If you are writing small apps and MVC does not explode at that size and fits nicely with the underlying frameworks, go ahead and use it (I strongly suspect you are an iOS dev and understand how conformity with the native framworks is very important there).

But if you are building something large, highly interactive, with lots of views and concurrency, try to move to a more declarative/unidirectional flow/functional approach. It is still an open field and there are many alternative approaches, but it builds down to composability, denotational reasoning and decoupling of effects/logic.