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Comment by emptyparadise

4 years ago

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.

22 comments

emptyparadise

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herval  4 years ago

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.

  • rnd0  4 years ago

    >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?

    • moonchild  4 years ago

      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.

    • herval  4 years ago

      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.

      3 replies →

yucky  4 years ago

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?

  • emptyparadise  4 years ago

    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.

_abox  4 years ago

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

And Android still has a visible file system.

  • unstatusthequo  4 years ago

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

    • _abox  4 years ago

      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.

    • yucky  4 years ago

      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.