Today, I started digging into documentation on Cocoa’s interpretation of MVC patterns in the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide. The design patterns chapter focused too much on jargon to be useful for me, but the MVC chapter cleared up a lot of things. I like how Cocoa’s use of MVC terminology tries to be useful rather than falling into the recursive trap of obsessing about logical consistency, as I’ve seen happen elsewhere.
I used to buy into jargon like “View Models”, “Control Models”, “View Control Models”, etc., but you’re modeling whenever you abstract. We perceive the world through many layers of abstractions, and three layers aren’t enough to model reality, or even just the slice of reality you’re working with. I used to get confused trying to model human-machine interactions into a three-layer ontology because that’s I thought we were supposed to do. Then, a wise man helped me see the limitations of MVC by shattering it against our concurrent, physical (metaphysical?) reality. It’s really just turtles all the way down, man, so, like, stick to the problem at hand. 