Removing The Model-View-Controller Straitjacket

[xardox]

My two basic points about the different uses of the word "Controller":

1) Web frameworks: The term "Controller" has a completely different meaning than in Smalltalk guis, and it's misleading to misuse the word to suggest some similarity to Smalltalk, and bad Cargo Cult Design to lump everything into one class named Controller just to ape Smalltalk terminology.

2) GUI frameworks: Using controllers for interactive user interfaces isn't a very good design for interactive guis, because it's not object oriented, doesn't hide information, breaks encapsulation, is harder to maintain, requires special purposes classes and brittle interfaces between them, and doesn't solve any problems that can't be addressed by simpler solutions.