In the beginning, there was a giant mess. Well, maybe not quite, but in modern software development, we've got lots of design and architectural patterns that we can draw on to help us shape an application and ensure we're not reinventing the wheel. Each of these is the result of decades of their work, which is constantly reviewed and put into practice, and we all hope that the most elegant and useful work will bubble to the top. Along the way, we've seen clumsy patterns being overtaken by more elegant ones. Hopefully, our mess has become a little bit less tangled.

A key development in the way we build graphical interfaces was model-view-controller (MVC), which was invented at the near-legendary Xerox PARC in the 1970s by Norwegian computer scientist Trygve Reenskaug. It was first publicly incorporated in Smalltalk, a programming language developed by a cast of computer scientists including Alan Kay. It brought together a host of ideas, which influenced nearly all the object...