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Comment by jabroni_salad | Hacker News Reader

I promise you it is younger people too. I train bank workers from freshly minted tellers to longtime officers, none of them can navigate to a URL unless it is a clickable hyperlink. The URL is one of the most foundational elements of internet usage, it is the way to get directly to where you want to go. Having a map is nice, but don't you need to know how to walk in order to get where you are going?

Heck, there have recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

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I've actually been hearing and interesting theory that the younger generation is becoming even more computer illiterate than the generation before them.

The younger generation was raised on iPads and iPhones where everything is easy to use and "just works". They've never had to do anything beyond tap the icon for the App they want.

Edit: Was going to talk about that same article about File directories.

This is true, the ease of use and proliferation of simplified and straightforward user interface conventions has had the adverse effect of making everyone born after 1998 practically unable to use a computer outside of the 4 major websites and apps.

I have witnessed this with younger people joining the company I work at. Most of them don't seem to have much of an idea how a computer works, why putting the internet between them and their deadlines might be bad or just can't figure out where their files are. I have to do a lot of hand holding for the first few months anyway.

where everything is easy to use and "just works"

And that's unironically a good thing. To poorly paraphrase Alan Kay, you know a certain piece of technology works when it gets out of the way and becomes second nature.

However we're now encountering one of those pesky questions that we never hear about in sci-fi because it's hard to solve and it's not fun for authors to write about: are we setting up future generations for failure by making technology too easy? And it's most likely "yes". I wonder out loud: are children not getting courses on how to use a desktop computer anymore like they used to in the 90s/2000s? It seems like it. Even if they never encounter having to browse a file system again until they graduate, the fact that it's at least introduced to them while their brains are still terrific sponges would be beneficial.

I've never had to do long division after ~6th grade, but given a few minutes of recall, I can get right back into it because of the rote learning I had.

> Heck, there have recently been articles about STEM students that do not know how to work with a basic file directory.

File directories, and the filesystem generally, confuse the hell out of the vast majority of computer users. We nerds forget this stuff because at age 12 we really gave a shit about it and took the time to internalize what it all means, and it's been second nature ever since, but most people haven't had the "a-ha" moment we did about it, so far back we've almost forgotten we needed an "a-ha" moment for something so "simple and obvious".

We get that this over here and that over there "are" the same thing, but that neither "is" the thing it's representing, which may also be represented entirely differently over in this other place. When we search in a file explorer window and it "becomes" something totally different, we get what's happened and that nothing's "gone anywhere". Normal people don't.

And it's limited to the systems we're exposed to. I grew up with DOS and then windows so I know file structure there no problem, but I'm still not comfortable with how Linux organizes things, and I haven't the faintest clue about Mac.

I used a friend's mac once and I (a competent windows/linux user) could not find the top most file directory. Scary times.

"ls /" ?

I feel like a big part of the problem is that back when computers were newly introduced to the world at large, there were actually good tutorials on how to use them.

Consider the Windows 3.1 interactive mouse tutorial/Windows tutorial. [0] This was designed for an age where both mice and Windows were relatively new and people didn't know how to use them, and it's one of the better designed tutorials out there, I think, allowing the user to interact with the tutorial and instantly see the results of their actions.

However, nowadays if you try to look up a tutorial on how to use a mouse, you're probably not going to find very much. The best I could find was hosted at gcfglobal.org [1], and explained the concepts and how to do things with a mouse, and has relevant interactive parts, but requires knowledge of how to scroll the page (which it does tell you how to do at the top, but there's only so much room there). There was also a set of pages called hosted at pbclibrary.org [2] which goes over the mouse basics and doesn't require scrolling before the concept is introduced, but it's somewhat outdated.

But those two were about it. The rest were mostly non-interactive videos. And in all these cases, discovery is a major problem - most of the time, the only way you're going to be able to get to those in the first place is through someone who already knows how to use a mouse.

We're all assuming that schools are teaching these basics. But what if they're not?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmFzIllvHzU

[1] https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/mousetutorial/mouse-tutorial/1/

[2] http://www.pbclibrary.org/mousing/

I think that the fact newer versions of popular OSes (Windows, Android) try hard and harder to hide the filesystem from the users - probably because "they won't understand". But in the long run, hiding it makes the problem even worse.

The transition to mobile computing devalued typing and greatly increased the attraction of icon grids.

There was some series of essays recently that I read (linked from HN maybe) that went into some details about the economic differences between search-based desktop computing and "juicy springboard of icons" mobile computing.

It isn't surprising, really. Computers are wonderful and complicated devices but a lot of knowledge about them is handed down more as an oral history, and it is dense and has had over fifty years of tumultuous growth.

Have you ever thought about even just the jargon you need to know to be fluent today? Not even just the important computer systems terms, but the names of tools, all the acronyms, the context of why things are the way they are.. its huge, and its endless. The stuff we think about as basic really never was, and now it gets hidden behind a slick user interface, and you might reasonably get to your third year in a CS program before getting a handle on how everything sort of fits together.

I see this all the time, with people not understanding where files are or that there is some kind of hierarchical filesystem lurking behind the covers. Thanks for the link.

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