4 ms·

Unpopular opinion: Relative paths (paths in general, really) are a terrible thing, and it's excellent that people are able to get by without that knowledge.

zaphar 8y ago
I don't think we'll ever get away from hierarchies as a useful organizational strategy as a species. Paths are a useful way to encode those hierarchies. They are concise and easy to read. Most of the replacements for paths try to pretend that there is no hierarchy or force people to not use a hierarchy. Personally I find the hierarchy to be a very useful tool and paths on a file system to be a useful way of representing them.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  There is always a hierarchy. Trying to pretend there isn't one is just stupid, because hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. If a platform tries to hide the natural hierarchy, users will still build their own out of clues given by the UI, and the result can be unnecessarily confusing.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. Whether it's fundamental or a product of socialization, ISTR there is a substantial empirical difference to the degree to which heirarchy is used to model the world between men and women, so if that is true at all it may be true only for certain values of “our”.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Hierarchy is created when you start considering whether or not a thing is a part of some other thing. Sexual reproduction forms trees. Causality forms trees along time axis. I think the concept it's pretty fundamental, even if some specific connotations are learned through socialization.
      - gizmo686 8y ago
        > Sexual reproduction forms trees. No it doesn't; it forms directed acyclic graphs. (Consider the fact that all humans share a common ancestor). There are probably parts of biology where reproduction does form a tree, but given the existence of horizontal gene transfer, I am not confident in speculating what they are.

zaphar 8y ago

I don't think we'll ever get away from hierarchies as a useful organizational strategy as a species. Paths are a useful way to encode those hierarchies. They are concise and easy to read. Most of the replacements for paths try to pretend that there is no hierarchy or force people to not use a hierarchy. Personally I find the hierarchy to be a very useful tool and paths on a file system to be a useful way of representing them.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
There is always a hierarchy. Trying to pretend there isn't one is just stupid, because hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. If a platform tries to hide the natural hierarchy, users will still build their own out of clues given by the UI, and the result can be unnecessarily confusing.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > hierarchy as a concept is as fundamental to how our minds work as it could be. Whether it's fundamental or a product of socialization, ISTR there is a substantial empirical difference to the degree to which heirarchy is used to model the world between men and women, so if that is true at all it may be true only for certain values of “our”.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Hierarchy is created when you start considering whether or not a thing is a part of some other thing. Sexual reproduction forms trees. Causality forms trees along time axis. I think the concept it's pretty fundamental, even if some specific connotations are learned through socialization.
    - gizmo686 8y ago
      > Sexual reproduction forms trees. No it doesn't; it forms directed acyclic graphs. (Consider the fact that all humans share a common ancestor). There are probably parts of biology where reproduction does form a tree, but given the existence of horizontal gene transfer, I am not confident in speculating what they are.