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.