Gen Z Kids Don't Understand How File Systems Work
futurism.com
futurism.com
And Android still has a visible file system.
IOS hides it a lot more. There wasn't even a file manager until they introduced one with iPadOS.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
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") :-)
What happened to intellectual curiosity and wanting to learn for the sake of understanding how things work?
How is it being forced on you? Nobody forces you to use Apple products. Or Google services. Or FB/Insta. etc
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.
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..."
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?
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.
What’s the lowdown?
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 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 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.
I was in shocked especially considering she went to a private school costing over 20k in one of the wealthiest places in America
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.
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.
Does anyone know why directories were renamed around the win95 time?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I’m fact I’m much more productive since I stopped tweaking my Emacs config and just thought before writing code.
At the end of the day, the purpose of some things is just to get out of your way.
And hopefully labels/tags.