We built this future. We built platforms that do not allow using the file system. We built this mobile-first, file system-last world. We're to blame.

Why "blame"? What's inherently great about file systems that _must_ survive generations?

My father was a programmer in his COBOL years, and heavily user of text editors and all sorts of terminal-based systems in his job. He never "got" Windows, or graphic interfaces in general. The metaphor just didn't land.

>What's inherently great about file systems that _must_ survive generations?

Filesystems are one example which points to a lack of understanding of how computers work on a lower level. If you can't understand how things work on a lower level you can't repair or innovate on a lower level. Eventually shit breaks down and we're back to bear knives and flint skins.

I would ask -what's so great about NOT knowing about file systems?

File systems are an abstraction we created over disc storage. The discs don't care. They only know about sectors of, say, 4096 bits. It is not at all clear that a hierarchical structure of byte-records is the best abstraction to create over that storage.

File systems are not how "computers work on a lower level" - they're just a handy abstraction we (well, someone much smarter than me) introduced in the 70s. Like any abstraction, it's an imperfect and incomplete metaphor to something else.

As an example of "how it actually works", when I had my first computer, I had to manually defrag disks all the time, otherwise they'd get screwed faster. Modern OSes eventually paved over that detail, so you don't have to know how to do that. That prevents you from repairing a fragged disk, or innovating at a lower level. And it doesn't really matter.

> And it doesn't really matter.

Okay. Defragging your disk prepares you to understand the concept of heap fragmentation later on in life. Understanding heap fragmentation and how to avoid it, how to compact segments, how to allocate smartly, allows you to write MUCH MUCH faster and higher quality software.

Today, there are a hundred thousand Zoomer developers spraying exabytes of poorly allocated objects all over the heaps of millions of production systems.

We frequently lament the fact that our standard Office applications run slower on 16 core, 4GHz machines than they did on a 66MHz 486DX, then we proceed to claim that the towers of abstractions we've built and the complete ignorance of the underlying hardware "doesn't really matter".

Most people who remember "defragging" have no clue what it actually does, and those that do have no problem understanding the issue of "heap fragmentation".

And if you think that developers below the age of 25 are the main reason your standard Office apps are slow, I wonder when you think that trend started and what the workforce building them looks like.

Same with everything else that's part of what's "understand how file systems work" means for users. It's an abstraction that tells you nothing about the underlying hardware - not to mention the underlying hardware having evolved quite a bit over the past few decades.

> Defragging your disk prepares you to understand the concept of heap fragmentation later on in life

uhhh no. Absolutely did NOT help me, or any of the people I know (many of which never got into tech, so don't even understand what a programming language is, let alone "heaps") :-)

This is silly. You're telling the generation that built the technology where it never existed, that not hand holding the next generation is why they're technically illiterate?

What happened to intellectual curiosity and wanting to learn for the sake of understanding how things work?

It's fine if we were indifferent, but we're doing the opposite of hand holding - we are actively misleading and moving users away from general computing by forcing them into locked down apps and websites.

I disagree. It appears that they are asking for the locked down simplified apps, and so the market is providing them.

What's an example of somebody prefering to be locked down? I've never heard of somebody agreeing that being locked down was a great feature. It looks to me like nobody prefers that and it's being forced onto us.

>It looks to me like nobody prefers that and it's being forced onto us.

How is it being forced on you? Nobody forces you to use Apple products. Or Google services. Or FB/Insta. etc

Users asked for apps that were easy to use. Smart phone manufacturers came up with the "locked down" part, and it's accepted because of collusion.

Android phones can be rooted for free. So your argument doesn't work.

The fact that you even _need_ to root Android phones shows that there's nothing wrong with my argument.

Well... Apple did. The rest just followed them.

And Android still has a visible file system.

The apple fan boys cant stand the truth. Ios and app file systems are completely to blame

Palm Pilots didn't have folders :-)

Oh come on. How can you seriously say that? I think what you mean is “smartphones hide the underlying file system, regardless of platform.”

Android has always had a file manager and doesn't hide the filesystem from tools like adb. You still can't access the OS files and app private storage but when you download a file you can actually choose where to save it :)

IOS hides it a lot more. There wasn't even a file manager until they introduced one with iPadOS.

Nah it is an Apple ethos. I remember the first time looking at a browser on a friends computer and asking what the URL was and he just said {domain}.com. And I'm wondering what the full URL is and apparently that is hidden from users? Blew my mind. So yeah.

Speak for yourself, I didn't build any of that mobile trash.

This is just the latest fallout from the "digital native" hypothesis that people will learn computers by osmosis and thus don't need to be taught. People don't understand computers? Teach them!

Bro I had computer courses in elementary school and middle school.

Younger sibling did not, so we end up teaching them. You don't learn how to use computers by osmosis and I'm glad people are pointing it out.

EDIT: I had typing classes too. It's astounding how many younger people I see who do not know how to type properly. I'm not even 30 and I'm already going "back in my day..."

no one taught me, and I've spent my entire career working in professional roles teaching colleagues how to do what I do.

I'm not a teacher, and I didn't go to college. I barely graduated high school.

I just have a passion for being paid far less than anyone around me while doing the most work, I think.

I agree with you totally. It's really frustrating to me that we are often so impatient with people who struggle with computers. Both people from older generations and younger generations both suffer a lot of shame around asking for help with computers even though a lot of aspects of technology require a foundational knowledge that is often never taught in a formal manner.

As a Gen Z folk studying alongside others… this is more of the typical “ha ha this generation is lost” BS.

Come on, man, you notice a couple students don’t want to meticulously organize their files and… go on to write this?

We know how to use folders. We use them. It’s not too hard to grasp. Sometimes things just aren’t worth the time organizing, especially with search getting so good.

If anything, this is a testament to how far we’ve come: search is so good, that the inconveniences of the past are fading away. That’s progress, no?

> especially with search getting so good

This is kind of the crux of it here. The reason this is a "Gen Z thing" is because you really couldn't get away with just using search until relatively recently.

I don't know of anyone my age (gen x/millennial) who even thinks to use Windows search because it was so tragically useless for so long.

I'm a balding millennial and I've been "organizing" my files this way for a long time.

I find I remember things based on time, so one long list is ideal and nested folders is just hiding things from myself. I organize physical spaces this way too, or more accurately I find spaces organized this way easiest to use but it tends to bother anyone I live with so I don't do it as much as I'd like.

I'm on the border between gen z / millennial. In our space (tech) this does seem like a completely ridiculous claim. But out in the real world I have witnessed this, and if this article were completely accurate it would not surprise me.

Is it accurate? I'm not sure, I have witnessed people in "gen z" do this sort of thing, but how widespread it is I can't say.

The post is not about folders, folders are but a small facet of a filesystem

Educate us about file systems. I’m a little unsure of whether or not I should trust out-of-tree ZFS.

What’s the lowdown?

Had this experience working with a bright gen z early academic once. They didn't understand the difference between files in the cloud and on their own drive. Took me about a week before I could even comprehend what their issue was.

The filesystem concept has changed a lot over the decades so that's really not surprising. Almost any platform young people are using is going to have a UI abstraction over the storage that typically pre-groups files by the handling application or expect the user to search a potentially off-device storage pool like Google Drive or iCloud or Sharepoint or whatever via full text and metadata.

I certainly wouldn't expect anyone born after about 1980 to have dealt with VMS filesystem concepts or various mainframe record storages, and it would likely be very difficult for today's students to synthesize the reasoning behind the Windows "drive letter" concept without hitting wikipedia to read up on why that trainwreck is still around.

How else are you supposed to differentiate between hardware drives?

Shows the fundamental importance of search/indexing instead of categorization IMO. Feels like they are onto something.

back in 2012 there was a girl who asked me if I could see a file she uploaded online. I asked her for a link to which she replied "c://users/hername/documents/photo.jpg"

I was in shocked especially considering she went to a private school costing over 20k in one of the wealthiest places in America

I'm not sure how the amount of money one pays for education is in any way I dicarive of their knowledge of how computers work.

I don't think dicarive is a word?

And it absolutely can.

School with less funding often don't have the same access to technology. This school required a laptop purchase from each student, and there's probably a correlation between income and computer literacy.

Did she use the forward slashes? Makes it look valid: protocol 'c', host 'users' and whatever default port protocol 'c' uses. ;-)

Many Windows tools will convert to / if they're presenting a URL, I'd imagine there is some special case code that treats unqualified path-lookalikes as file:// minus the protocol specifier. In fact chrome produces exactly that result when I did it just now, and only if you expand the full address bar do you see a file:// preceding /c:/what/ever/path

I mean… good? Same with floppy disks. Removing a whole, often needless, level of abstraction from users of all kinds is a great thing.

not being able to understand the concept of a folder structure or a file hierarchy goes way beyond some technical implementation detail. That's a fundamental concept that you find outside of digital systems (duh, given the folder metaphor)

This isn't some legacy artifact, it's more like losing the ability to read an actual map or orient yourself because your navigation system tells you where to go next. Which is something that I've noticed increasingly as well with many people.

Do kids not understand the concept of a filing system? I think they do understand it.

They get that you can have multiple labeled filing cabinets, each with multiple labeled folders, each with multiple papers.

They can abstract that to digital files if they have to, probably within seconds (say if a game mechanic required them to understand this).

But do they need to?

Yes. The file is the concept about owning your data and not relying on some algorithm controlled by a 3rd party controlling access to it.

Oh, those stories go back to 2015 and beyond: https://theweek.com/articles/464674/8-drivers-who-blindly-fo...

You call it a folder, not a directory, seems you aren’t immune from the rot.

Does anyone know why directories were renamed around the win95 time?

MacOS called them folders from its very start. Windows until 95 was really just a shell on top of DOS. 95 was too but it was much more of a full featured OS in its own right.

I guess they just wanted to use the metaphor that made sense visually too. Since it was always represented by a folder icon. I don't remember what Windows 1-3 called them but they weren't visually represented by a folder but by a window with little icons. Which didn't make a ton of sense.

The Windows 3.1 File Manager definitely used folder icons that were quite similar to what Windows Explorer used in future versions. The windows full of icons you remember were in Program Manager, which was replaced by the Start menu.

Apple called them "folders" because they had this "desktop metaphor" where the files were pieces of paper and the background (what we call the "desktop" today) was like a physical desk.

This is also the reason GUI programs typically have a white background. It's like you're typing on a typewriter and the background is made of paper.

Prior to GUIs, it was common to see black backgrounds and glowing text, because that was easier for the hardware than the opposite.

Do you have an example of a GUI that doesn't use folders to represent directories? Macs, Linux, and Windows do. That's almost 100% of the GUIs in existence.

Because a folder makes more sense in a GUI environment.

Floppies had directories. Except in the very earliest MS-DOS versions 1.x which didn't have subdirectories. They were added in 2.0

I know people often didn't use directories on floppies but the complexity was replaced by another one: which floppy contained the file you were looking for. Most people had big boxes full of hundreds of them.

I'd rather that level of abstraction came off the top. Not the bottom tbqh. Not understanding filesystems is one of the biggest handicaps in terms of realizing that all a computer is is an address space management machine. Completely undermines the desktop metaphor, and leads to crap like Android, where you're not even looked at as the primary owner/operator of your own handset.

i also doubt kids don’t “get” folders, since basically any major file storage (desktop OS, mobile OS, cloud storage) has them in some form. They’re just not using them.

I know directories just fine, I’ve used them for 30 years, but 90% of the time I find files using “locate” rather than a hierarchal structure

I also don't understand how filesystems work.

They have like... b-trees? And inodes? Something like that. Or is inode a linux thing? No that's file descriptor... I guess?

What is a journal? I don't know. Something that exists somewhere. Is it the same as systemd journal? I don't know.

And I still don't understand why I need to use FAT32 from like 2000 to be able to work on Linux, OS X and Windows. Why is there no standard that works everywhere? What's the hard part there?

>What's the hard part there?

Capitalism; IOW shareholder value and vendor lock-in.

It's' difficult to get separate corporations to implement compatibility when their profits and lock-in rely on vendor lock-in.

They already do on harder things like video codecs.

Alliance for Open Media (AV1/VP9 creators) steam-rolled over MPEG; has everyone big on board (Apple joined recently); is open and works on Linux.

Why not filesystems?

But I guess as people move to cloud, it matters way less how to share USB flash drives.

People who write these articles will talk for an hour straight about their favorite window manager, why it should actually be called Gnu/Linux, or why it’s “free as in beer”.

and your point would be...what?

If you're not someone who can see that one class of window managers makes you much more productive than another, then quite frankly you're probably not a great programmer and just get by with some SO copy-paste, things might not be so good for you once the tech boom busts

When I was a TA for computer science the students with tiling window managers had the worst grades in class and talked exactly like this.

If your choice of window manager makes a measurable relative difference to your productivity then you are probably not a good programmer.

If this is not a copy-pasta, it should be a copy-pasta.

I always thought being able to design code itself was the main way to get productivity. That takes way longer than actually typing the code, and you can do it on a whiteboard / pen and paper. I’ve never used a window manager that affected my productivity in any way.

I’m fact I’m much more productive since I stopped tweaking my Emacs config and just thought before writing code.

That's fair but sometimes there are things I learn iteratively and fast interaction with computers comes really handy there

Bro, the amount of time I have wasted trying to rice a wm and fix broken AUR packages only to say screw it and just go back to working on Windows + WSL (well, ubuntu these days, but STOCK ubuntu).

At the end of the day, the purpose of some things is just to get out of your way.

I don't use a "Window Manager". I just run Microsoft Windows.

Don't people who think this usually use Emacs and not any window managers?

I use vim. This is a bit of a troll, but the baseline feeling is that people who’ve used a tiling window manager (as a group) are probably more interested in computers than people who haven’t.

People who like tiling window managers are the sort of people who think every year will be the year of Linux on the desktop for the last 3 decades, i.e., nerds, so I don't know how much their taste can be trusted.

These are mostly systems they've come up with themselves rather than UI researchers actually studying it. Research finds things like that keyboard shortcuts aren't actually faster than mousing, people just experience them as faster because they take more focus.

based

Buckets and pathnames, ahead of their time: Cloud-natives.

And hopefully labels/tags.

Fondly remembering wrapping my head around the "soup" way beck when I was programming my Newton...

So what? I can imagine newspapers in the 1910s lamenting that children no longer know how to light a paraffin lamp. And articles from the 1930's complaining that modern children feel uncomfortable around horses. Times change. Also, i don't really believe that kids today are that unsavvy.

My first OS was CP/M. It didn't have directories either.