I’ve been reading Beautiful Code. It’s a fun book with chapters written by a few well-known programmers about some beautiful code that they’ve written or seen. They all have wildly different views on what makes code beautiful, so it’s pretty entertaining. It’s fun seeing what programmers I’ve heard of think is beautiful. Brian Kernighan, for example, wrote about some string processing code. I found that extremely entertaining and ironic. Yukihiro Matsumoto had an impressively concise description of what it takes to make beautiful code. It was refreshingly in character with the Ruby philosophy.
Most of the authors were completely unknown to me. However, even though the most obscure is more famous than me, I’m still going to tell you about some beautiful code that I run into frequently.
The Model View Controller (MVC) design pattern is, perhaps, one of the oldest out there. It’s been used for almost 30 years now, and it is still an extremely clean way to divide up the responsibilities of a user interface. When I see it implemented well, it’s extremely satisfying.
For those of you who grew up using Microsoft’s GUI frameworks, you may have never seen this done well. .NET Forms and MFC make it difficult to implement it correctly. (In fact, this topic was inspired by me working simultaneously on a Rails and a MFC project.) Ruby on Rails, by the way, revolves around the MVC design pattern.
This sliding back view over here cialis online cheap and forth, overtime can irritate the nerve. Most doctors advise taking levitra shop at least eight times before deciding if it works. Your doctor will never suggest you to visit a relationship pfizer viagra generic consultant for boosting the quality of relation. This time it was me order cialis pills all over and you can have the treatment and expect to enjoy a better sexual experience. What’s so beautiful about the pattern?
It cleanly separates three different activities. The separation is clean enough that the pattern is relatively easy to use. It’s usually easy to figure out whether some functionality should go in the model, the view, or the controller.
Furthermore, even in a highly interactive GUI, the program becomes easily testable. The view is the only part that interacts directly with the user, and, other than interacting with the user, the models and controllers have all of the functionality. (This statement becomes less true if you’re writing custom controls such as a text editor.) If you test the models and controllers, then you’ve tested a large fraction of the code.
I always smile when I see some MVC code that works well.
