After reading Moderately Valuable Cliché, reader Nicholas Levin got in touch to recommend that I look at the back of my Smalltalk-80 books. Here’s the blue one.
Addison-Wesley’s Smalltalk-80 series.
The first book mentioned in “Other books in the … Series” is the red book, “Smalltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment”. The third is the green book, “Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice”. But the middle one? “Smalltalk-80: Creating a User Interface and Graphical Applications”? No-one ever assigned that one a colour. It was never published.
Discussions of the book in comp.lang.smalltalk in 1986 indicate that it was a manifesto for Model-View-Controller, promoting and describing the pattern for building Smalltalk applications. The thread instead recommends looking at Chapter 9 of a book that has been mentioned on this blog before: Object-Oriented Programming: an evolutionary approach by Brad Cox. More on that later.
So the idea behind MVC was well-known in the Smalltalk user community, but the principle was not documented by the Smalltalk team themselves (as far as I know: it’s possible there are documents I haven’t found) until Adele Goldberg left and founded ParcPlace with others at the end of the 1980s.
Levin also pointed me at a couple of other resources. In this interview for the Computer History Museum, Adele Goldberg confirms that the missing book was “to be an applications level book which was basically the model-view-controller metaphor”.
In an interview for the IEEE Global History Network, Goldberg explains how the whole concept of the Dynabook was to allow people to model real-world problems on their portable computers:
That’s what we thought it was, a PDP-10, which is lightweight compared to what we have now. It was going to be there, like a notepad, but it was going to be a computational-based device that allowed you to build models of the world and test your understanding of the world. What students who succeed really do is, they interact with teachers and parents and other people—and it could be other students—who challenge the models they build of their world; and this is true whether it’s science, math, or social studies: that you’re constantly constructing and deconstructing. And when someone really pushes you to think about your models, make the models explicit, talk about those models, and be able to build those models and then challenge those models—I mean, every well educated person I know remembers in their childhood that that was what was going on all the time.
In other words, Smalltalk is the programming equivalent of “[taking] apart engines and [putting] them back together again, to understand how things work”.
The long time over which the books were written and the fact that the system was being designed in reaction to problems found in documenting it (“In order to get the language book done we kind of organized ourselves so that Dan Ingalls and I, we’d have an aspect of the system we’d need to agree on like, what would be the collection classes? How would you provide collections?”) explains why the blue book’s FinancialHistory example can have no MVC, the red book briefly mentions MVC, and the authors of the ParcPlace paper, looking back, can remember it as a key part of the sample. Perhaps that example was eventually fleshed out for the unprinted book, or was developed further for another reason beyond the publication of the blue book.
We also have a possible reason for the subsequent diversity of interpretations of MVC among applications developers. With no primary reference for the original intention behind MVC, as the Addison-Wesley book was unwritten, people guessed at what Model-View-Controller meant from the bits and pieces that were published or discussed in the community.
