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I think the most important thing about files is being able to take a unit of work - a picture or a document - and interact with it as a single object, doing thi

I think the most important thing about files is being able to take a unit of work - a picture or a document - and interact with it as a single object, doing things like copying it or sharing it with others. Any replacement system that doesn't let me take my work and simply drag it to a flash drive is flawed. This doesn't mean we can't use a database, but it is something important to remember.

klodolph 6y ago
> I think the most important thing about files is being able to take a unit of work - a picture or a document - and interact with it as a single object, doing things like copying it or sharing it with others. Yes, we want this, but the filesystem is actually quite bad at this! We have just gotten used to how bad files and filesystems are, and ignore the fact that they are not good matches for our metaphors about how they work. Just to be clear—I completely disagree with your claims about how files work. You can’t really interact much with a file as a single object. When you open a document, a copy of the file is loaded into memory. This separate, invisible copy does not show up on the filesystem and will be out of synch with the filesystem copy. For example, 1. Open a text file in Vim, Nano, or Emacs. 2. In another terminal window, rename the file. 3. Make changes to the text file and save it. What happens? You end up with two different files! This is not some weird hackery, this is just renaming a file, one of the most boring things you can do. Something I do all the time. It shows that files are not single objects, and you do not interact with them that way. This is one of the failings of the Unix filesystem model—files are not single objects. There is a ton of room for improvement. Just as a point of comparison, Windows is a bit worse (usually won’t even let you rename the file) and the Mac is a bit better (when you rename a file, the open document will follow the rename).
- emptyparadise 6y ago
  I'm speaking more of files as a metaphor than as a file system implementation detail. I'm pointing this out because the mobile first and web first world dropped the ball on this incredibly badly. Every webapp is an isolated silo with weird logins and no proper offline usage whatsoever. To share a small anecdote, I recently asked a non-technical acquaintance how they would share a Word document from their desktop computer: they said they'd email the file. Then I asked how they would share a note from their phone's notes app: they had no clue. Yes, implementation details bleed through: I can tell that Word operates on files and the notes app probably has some sqlite database under the hood, but ultimately it's about how we interact with data. Word operates on content you have, while the notes app operates on content it has. And this is where my flash drive test came from, not because I'm attached to inodes or directories, but because of the interaction model that decouples apps and data. If tomorrow I wake up in a world where ext4 has been replaced by Postgres as its file system, I wouldn't miss chmod or fsck. But I'd want to be sure I can still take a single object (a file!) and do actions with it - send it to somebody, delete it, copy it, all without it having some inseparable link to an app or a website.
  - klodolph 6y ago
    > I'm speaking more of files as a metaphor than as a file system implementation detail. Ah, you are definitely not responding to my comment, then. Never mind.

klodolph 6y ago

> I think the most important thing about files is being able to take a unit of work - a picture or a document - and interact with it as a single object, doing things like copying it or sharing it with others. Yes, we want this, but the filesystem is actually quite bad at this! We have just gotten used to how bad files and filesystems are, and ignore the fact that they are not good matches for our metaphors about how they work. Just to be clear—I completely disagree with your claims about how files work. You can’t really interact much with a file as a single object. When you open a document, a copy of the file is loaded into memory. This separate, invisible copy does not show up on the filesystem and will be out of synch with the filesystem copy. For example, 1. Open a text file in Vim, Nano, or Emacs. 2. In another terminal window, rename the file. 3. Make changes to the text file and save it. What happens? You end up with two different files! This is not some weird hackery, this is just renaming a file, one of the most boring things you can do. Something I do all the time. It shows that files are not single objects, and you do not interact with them that way. This is one of the failings of the Unix filesystem model—files are not single objects. There is a ton of room for improvement. Just as a point of comparison, Windows is a bit worse (usually won’t even let you rename the file) and the Mac is a bit better (when you rename a file, the open document will follow the rename).

emptyparadise 6y ago
I'm speaking more of files as a metaphor than as a file system implementation detail. I'm pointing this out because the mobile first and web first world dropped the ball on this incredibly badly. Every webapp is an isolated silo with weird logins and no proper offline usage whatsoever. To share a small anecdote, I recently asked a non-technical acquaintance how they would share a Word document from their desktop computer: they said they'd email the file. Then I asked how they would share a note from their phone's notes app: they had no clue. Yes, implementation details bleed through: I can tell that Word operates on files and the notes app probably has some sqlite database under the hood, but ultimately it's about how we interact with data. Word operates on content you have, while the notes app operates on content it has. And this is where my flash drive test came from, not because I'm attached to inodes or directories, but because of the interaction model that decouples apps and data. If tomorrow I wake up in a world where ext4 has been replaced by Postgres as its file system, I wouldn't miss chmod or fsck. But I'd want to be sure I can still take a single object (a file!) and do actions with it - send it to somebody, delete it, copy it, all without it having some inseparable link to an app or a website.
- klodolph 6y ago
  > I'm speaking more of files as a metaphor than as a file system implementation detail. Ah, you are definitely not responding to my comment, then. Never mind.