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It's a bit different. Manual vs automatic transmission doesn't fundamentally alter what you can do with a car. You can still drive from A to B in either type. T

It's a bit different. Manual vs automatic transmission doesn't fundamentally alter what you can do with a car. You can still drive from A to B in either type. The only place not knowing manual might trip you up, is if you need to rent a car and they don't have automatics at all. Desktops vs phones is a very different proposition. There are a huge range of tasks that phones/tablets don't do and won't do any time soon. If you can't work a desktop computer then you're going to be unable to achieve many things that society has a critical need for. That's why universities are needing to teach students how to use files and directories but not how to drive manual cars. I read your other comments, you're right that files/folders were never a great metaphor. Recursive objects are unnatural and basically never encountered in real life, so even people who learned how to use files/folders will very often not use nested structures. Tree view widgets don't exist on phones/tablets for the same reasons, more or less, they have famously terrible usability study results. The problem is though, that iOS/Android/ChromeOS simplified their UX not actually by finding ways to make things simpler, but just by getting rid of the ability to do those things at all. Simple things are simple and complex things are out of scope. If these newer platforms represented pure progress in usability we either wouldn't see or wouldn't care about these articles because universities and companies would just use tablets for everything. They can't, primarily because of the choices made by those operating systems. Instead they have to give remedial classes in how to use Windows. It may not matter in the end, these are skills people can learn, it's not a big deal. But I don't think we should see this as being like with cars. It's clearly not. The industry made progress in some areas (simplicity, robustness) but only at the cost of abandoning large parts of what made computing so useful to begin with. It'd be more like if people didn't complain about oil changes anymore because cars had been replaced entirely with public transport. How to build a better "desktop" OS is still an open research problem, in my view.

Dalewyn 4y ago
>Desktops vs phones is a very different proposition. There are a huge range of tasks that phones/tablets don't do and won't do any time soon. I agree, but we're not talking about desktops/laptops vs. mobile devices; we are talking about using computers in general and whether a deeper understanding of computers is actually valuable to most people. >Recursive objects are unnatural and basically never encountered in real life, I disagree, recursive objects are everywhere. File cabinets are an obvious example, being the literal source of the metaphor. Public libraries are another. An employee's place within a company is also one. >The problem is though, that iOS/Android/ChromeOS simplified their UX not actually by finding ways to make things simpler, but just by getting rid of the ability to do those things at all. Simple things are simple and complex things are out of scope. If these newer platforms represented pure progress in usability we either wouldn't see or wouldn't care about these articles because universities and companies would just use tablets for everything. From the perspective of the average user, it's an absolute improvement in usability. They don't have to be concerned about technicalities they never cared about in the first place anymore. Photo and Camera apps just dump all pictures in one, single location and most people love it because they don't need to deal with files anymore. They're dealing with pictures they want to interact with, not "files". Want to send a picture to someone? Pick a picture in the Photo app and hit the email button! Even grandmas can figure that out, unlike going into your email client and digging through the file system to find the pict-- I'm sorry, file that you want to send. It pains me to write all this, actually, because I appreciate file system access. But the brutal reality of the matter is people don't fucking care, computers as we know it are an obnoxious nuisance to them. The people want computers that are simple and intuitive to use, power be damned because they can't and won't use that power anyway. >They can't, primarily because of the choices made by those operating systems. Instead they have to give remedial classes in how to use Windows. I'm actually half-expecting a paradigm shift from Apple on this front in the near future. They're slowly turning the iPad to be more in line with personal computers in productive capability, so if they succeed we might see the absolute end of the desktop and laptop form factors as anything more than an eccentric novelty; to be replaced by tablets, supported by servers on the internet ("the cloud") for the really intensive tasks. We're already seeing an astonishing adoption rate of "It Just Fucking Works(tm)" computers like Macbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones and tablets in places that would previously have been the absolute domain of Windows and Linux desktops and laptops. Apple and Google might be on the cusp of a turning point in personal computing history. >The industry made progress in some areas (simplicity, robustness) but only at the cost of abandoning large parts of what made computing so useful to begin with. Windows and Linux still exist for the enthusiasts and professionals who sincerely need or want that power of complexity and versatility. The takeaway is most people never needed nor wanted Windows and Linux, they always just wanted a computer that works like an appliance and software engineering and IT infrastructure is finally getting to the point that desire is a reality. >It'd be more like if people didn't complain about oil changes anymore because cars had been replaced entirely with public transport. If the world goes the way environmentalists and certain politicians want it to go, most of us certainly won't be complaining about oil changes soon. :V
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  > File cabinets are an obvious example. Public libraries are another. Hmm I guess I didn't use clear terminology. File cabinets aren't recursive because you can't literally put folders within folders within folders. I mean you can try but it's going to get pretty disastrous fast and most don't people don't use them that way. Likewise, the nesting scheme used by libraries isn't recursive. There's: Library > Shelf > Book. That's it. You can't have books that contain other books, or shelves that contain other shelves. You're right that family trees, corporate org chats etc are examples of recursive structures that don't cause people problems though. > The people want computers that are simple and intuitive to use, power be damned because they can't and won't use that power anyway ... Windows and Linux still exist for the enthusiasts and professionals Right ... putting enthusiasts to one side, my point is that "professionals" is a massive and very important category of people. Practically any office worker is going to be a professional of some kind or another. So they can and will use that power once they graduate beyond mere consumption and start needing to organize complex projects involving many types of data, work with that data in different kinds of apps and so on. Yes you can try and make it all happen using only search and share buttons, but that stops scaling pretty fast. Extreme example: programming would be nearly impossible with such an approach. But there are plenty of other examples, scientific/engineering work being one where the search+share paradigm just falls apart. Even just running a photography business would quickly become a nightmare if you had to rely on search for everything.

Dalewyn 4y ago

>Desktops vs phones is a very different proposition. There are a huge range of tasks that phones/tablets don't do and won't do any time soon. I agree, but we're not talking about desktops/laptops vs. mobile devices; we are talking about using computers in general and whether a deeper understanding of computers is actually valuable to most people. >Recursive objects are unnatural and basically never encountered in real life, I disagree, recursive objects are everywhere. File cabinets are an obvious example, being the literal source of the metaphor. Public libraries are another. An employee's place within a company is also one. >The problem is though, that iOS/Android/ChromeOS simplified their UX not actually by finding ways to make things simpler, but just by getting rid of the ability to do those things at all. Simple things are simple and complex things are out of scope. If these newer platforms represented pure progress in usability we either wouldn't see or wouldn't care about these articles because universities and companies would just use tablets for everything. From the perspective of the average user, it's an absolute improvement in usability. They don't have to be concerned about technicalities they never cared about in the first place anymore. Photo and Camera apps just dump all pictures in one, single location and most people love it because they don't need to deal with files anymore. They're dealing with pictures they want to interact with, not "files". Want to send a picture to someone? Pick a picture in the Photo app and hit the email button! Even grandmas can figure that out, unlike going into your email client and digging through the file system to find the pict-- I'm sorry, file that you want to send. It pains me to write all this, actually, because I appreciate file system access. But the brutal reality of the matter is people don't fucking care, computers as we know it are an obnoxious nuisance to them. The people want computers that are simple and intuitive to use, power be damned because they can't and won't use that power anyway. >They can't, primarily because of the choices made by those operating systems. Instead they have to give remedial classes in how to use Windows. I'm actually half-expecting a paradigm shift from Apple on this front in the near future. They're slowly turning the iPad to be more in line with personal computers in productive capability, so if they succeed we might see the absolute end of the desktop and laptop form factors as anything more than an eccentric novelty; to be replaced by tablets, supported by servers on the internet ("the cloud") for the really intensive tasks. We're already seeing an astonishing adoption rate of "It Just Fucking Works(tm)" computers like Macbooks, Chromebooks, and smartphones and tablets in places that would previously have been the absolute domain of Windows and Linux desktops and laptops. Apple and Google might be on the cusp of a turning point in personal computing history. >The industry made progress in some areas (simplicity, robustness) but only at the cost of abandoning large parts of what made computing so useful to begin with. Windows and Linux still exist for the enthusiasts and professionals who sincerely need or want that power of complexity and versatility. The takeaway is most people never needed nor wanted Windows and Linux, they always just wanted a computer that works like an appliance and software engineering and IT infrastructure is finally getting to the point that desire is a reality. >It'd be more like if people didn't complain about oil changes anymore because cars had been replaced entirely with public transport. If the world goes the way environmentalists and certain politicians want it to go, most of us certainly won't be complaining about oil changes soon. :V

mike_hearn 4y ago
> File cabinets are an obvious example. Public libraries are another. Hmm I guess I didn't use clear terminology. File cabinets aren't recursive because you can't literally put folders within folders within folders. I mean you can try but it's going to get pretty disastrous fast and most don't people don't use them that way. Likewise, the nesting scheme used by libraries isn't recursive. There's: Library > Shelf > Book. That's it. You can't have books that contain other books, or shelves that contain other shelves. You're right that family trees, corporate org chats etc are examples of recursive structures that don't cause people problems though. > The people want computers that are simple and intuitive to use, power be damned because they can't and won't use that power anyway ... Windows and Linux still exist for the enthusiasts and professionals Right ... putting enthusiasts to one side, my point is that "professionals" is a massive and very important category of people. Practically any office worker is going to be a professional of some kind or another. So they can and will use that power once they graduate beyond mere consumption and start needing to organize complex projects involving many types of data, work with that data in different kinds of apps and so on. Yes you can try and make it all happen using only search and share buttons, but that stops scaling pretty fast. Extreme example: programming would be nearly impossible with such an approach. But there are plenty of other examples, scientific/engineering work being one where the search+share paradigm just falls apart. Even just running a photography business would quickly become a nightmare if you had to rely on search for everything.