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To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN. There ar

To call it an abomination is annoyingly dramatic and "they don't know any better" is frankly elitist and I am really tired of these attitudes from HN. There are people in the world who grew up with and are used to platforms that have filing-cabinet abstractions (files and folders) and let them run their own code and customisations. Similarly, there are people in the world who grew up with devices that don't expose files and folders as readily and instead present things through apps and search. How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? Probably not, because they get just fine with a different set of abstractions and tools. Just because that isn't to your taste doesn't mean that they don't work fine for other people — there's a world of less technically-minded people out there who get by just fine with an iPad at home for the things they want to do. To them, computing has _never_ been more accessible than it is today and not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower.

memefrog 3y ago
It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents. >How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day. And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state. These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago. They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter". They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers. So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.
zozbot234 3y ago
The whole point of the filing-cabinet abstraction is to reify my access to something in some app. It's not a purely technical concept, it represents an affordance that users do care about. We went through this before; programs used to be written without any generalized notion of a file, and you'd have to work with things like "unit" records represented on punched cards, and "datasets" meaning collections of unit records. There's no reason to go back to that kind of chaos.
altcognito 3y ago
Fair about being annoyingly dramatic, sorry. I'm just trying to use my device and Apple makes it harder, not easier to do simple things like backup. You can build abstractions on top of the files and folders (and almost everyone does), but still provide access to regular files. The entire point about files and folder abstractions is that they are portable across platforms and they are technically sound. They want a moat, so they built one.

memefrog 3y ago

It's not a "filing-cabinet abstraction". "Files" and "folders" might as well be opaque and arbitrary words to most people. In a computing context, they have no or almost-no association with files and folders IRL. They don't even correspond to those concepts. In real life a "file" is literally a folder full of documents. >How many of the latter category could even accurately define what a "file" is? Do they even need to? All of them, because they don't just use phones. The same people have to write things for school and upload those .doc files onto a school website to have them automatically checked for plagiarism and marked, and if they ever work in an office they use files every day. And trust me, people are NOT being empowered by these devices. They actually find them super frustrating every single day. I know non-technical people. They hate modern devices. The old systems did the same thing every day, day in and day out. They didn't change every five minutes. They didn't hide all their state. These are non-technical people, who couldn't even connect their phone to WiFi without help from someone. Yet they had no problem with plugging their computers into the wall 10 years ago. They can't work out how to print things today, what with the awful array of proprietary printing apps made by the incompetent software developers working for printer companies, yet they had no problem printing things out when all you needed to do was plug the printer into the back of your computer once when you bought it and forevermore press "Ctrl-P" and "Enter". They can't easily use these newfangled tablets and phones to write documents or spreadsheets. Yet they had no problem using desktop office software 10 years ago. They had no problem with the concepts of files and folders. They do have a problem when they just can't work out how they're meant to get things from one device to another, because it's all opaque. They have to resort to things like sharing a document to themselves via email, then opening the document up in the email app and opening it in another app. That was the simplest solution that was obvious to my mother, and to be quite fair to her, that probably WAS the simplest way to move a document from one app to another. Having a single, universal, underlying "filesystem" metaphor that you learnt once and which applied to the whole system was great for non-technical people who just want to get on with using their computers. So no don't start with this "has never been more accessible" or "not having to worry about things like folders and files is actually a superpower" crap. It's the opposite.

zozbot234 3y ago

The whole point of the filing-cabinet abstraction is to reify my access to something in some app. It's not a purely technical concept, it represents an affordance that users do care about. We went through this before; programs used to be written without any generalized notion of a file, and you'd have to work with things like "unit" records represented on punched cards, and "datasets" meaning collections of unit records. There's no reason to go back to that kind of chaos.

altcognito 3y ago

Fair about being annoyingly dramatic, sorry. I'm just trying to use my device and Apple makes it harder, not easier to do simple things like backup. You can build abstractions on top of the files and folders (and almost everyone does), but still provide access to regular files. The entire point about files and folder abstractions is that they are portable across platforms and they are technically sound. They want a moat, so they built one.