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Comment by bryankaplan | Hacker News Reader

Did they also struggle to understand that some people have the same name yet are not the same person?

By that logic, operating system developers struggle to understand that putting two files with the same name into the same folder(1) is very much possible in the physical world.

(1) or referencing them from the same directory, which was the earlier metaphor.

Hardly. That would be analogous to two people having the same name _and_ the same spacetime coordinates; they would indeed be the same person.

I've seen two people with the same name and birthday, in different departments of the same building. Caused regular problems with management and HR.

I've also seen two different customers with the same name and phone number - the number got recycled and went to second one while the first hadn't updated their number on file. We had to tell them apart by address.

But why are filenames equated with spacetime coordinates? That doesn't make any sense - reflect on why you leaped to that analogy. The spacetime coordinates are the disk ID and sector number. We've been using operating systems that work a certain way for so long that we think filenames are like spacetime coordinates.

The analogy is location. file : directory :: person : geocoordinates. I thought it was a straight-forward analogy, but clearly I was mistaken.

You cannot name 2 of your children the same names.

In the time it took you to write this comment, you've thought more about the abstraction than most of the people who are confused by it -- and it will never succeed to coax them out of their confusion with such logic. :)

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