Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I'm 100% serious, the "humorous" version makes a ton more sense to me. That is, totally seriously, some great technical writing in that second diagram. Going from there to the shorter component names is much easier at that point. And I'm pretty familiar with this sort of design, but even so, since everybody has their own names for everything it's still harder to follow the original diagram. How much worse it would be for someone without experience.

View on HN

I wonder if the problem is that names like "action","dispatcher","view" are abstractions that no longer (if ever) have a meaningful precise definition that can be understood independent of context in an application/framework. I'll refrain pointing at other examples from elsewhere.

These terms seem like nice jargon to shorten discussions among people who already understand everything and just want to communicate quickly, but I don't think they help those outside who want to learn.

I have no idea what the solution is since jargon probably can't be avoided, but perhaps my request would be that folks understand that the semantic meaning of these terms are not transportable across different domains; they are not self-evident and should not be expected that learners will infer good enough meaning from the term alone.

I agree. A version of the diagram that showed the official name next to the description would be a great self-contained small reference.

I'll see what I can do. :)

Here ya go! http://d.pr/i/14Pi0

Heh, yep, that's pretty perfect

Great! Glad it helped.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com