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Comment by QuantumNoodle | Hacker News Reader

"kids" these days don't know what a file is. Seriously, ask anyone you know that is a college professor (in the states).

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For the non-believers: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...

At a former company, we had an 18yo intern: One day he was given the task to clean-up an old wall closet that wasnt touched for years.

He found some 3.5" floppy disk - he went over to us saying: "why did you 3d-print the Save-Icon from Office so many times"

:-D

Wait, is a "file' a folder or an app?

Yes.

I really don't know why you are being downvoted.

My experience is you are indeed correct. Modern phone/tablet users are so divorced from a file systems that those brought up on them have no idea what a file is or where their data is saved... The data (video, music, shopping-list) simply exists "in the app".

(And don't get me started on their concept of data portability!)

Yep our newest team member came in having never used a posix filesystem in a production environment. It genuinely blew my mind.

...I mean, we've spent the last decade building products with the explicit intention of hiding or otherwise papering over the File abstraction. The hell did anyone expect to happen as a result? People coming in or aging out lose the knowledge as part of context degradation. There was value in keeping it as a first order abstraction.

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