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Yes, but there are things that aren't so obsolete about using a computer that many young people don't know anymore and which are really still needed. I'm not th

Yes, but there are things that aren't so obsolete about using a computer that many young people don't know anymore and which are really still needed. I'm not the only person who has noticed that teaching the current generation of undergraduates that many of them don't understand the idea of a hierarchical file system, whether using the graphical folder analogy or as directories. They have trouble understanding that programs on computers save things in locations that you need to navigate to when trying to find it again. It isn't that these young people are stupid, it's that many of them are just used to phones where this idea either doesn't exist or is hidden from user access.

zabzonk 3y ago
i remember teaching people about hierarchical file systems in the early 1990s - so no not much has changed.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  True, but there was a good 20 year period or so when even non-technical people were familiar with it from using their own computers.
- bogwog 3y ago
  Well, not knowing about this in the 90s was reasonable. Not knowing about it today is a failure somewhere in our education system/society/whatever.
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    I argue it's a failure to continue teaching something that humans do not and will not understand, and arguably also do not want in the first place. Computers for most people are just another household appliance or tool of their trade. They use computers to achieve certain tasks and they don't have time nor interest to figure out the details of how. They want the results, not the process. Abstraction of the file system is a step in the right direction, even if it rustles the jimmies of nerds and beards everywhere.
    - guender 3y ago
      [dead]
  - bdcravens 3y ago
    Stacks have grown easier, but larger. The size of the labor pool is larger, and there are more abstractions. There was a time when programmers were all physicists, but I think it'd be silly to measure the talent of developers from the 90s by that standard. Ditto for measuring full stack developers by standard from a time when you needed nothing more than C and shell access to a cgi-bin folder.
a_gnostic 3y ago
Tell them you need a main enterance to access a building: Wide doors, fire safety regs. Next you need wide hallways, leading to atriums, with smaller doors, leading to apartments, individual rooms, cupboards, shelving, etc. A building is hierarchical, and similar to a file system. You can explain flow of people, flow of stuff, storage, whatever.
ghaff 3y ago
And honestly the file cabinet metaphor probably doesn't go over very well either because that doesn't mostly apply today either.
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Good point. For instance, object storage at first glance looks like the file cabinet, but that abstraction isn't entirely correct.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    The historical situation was that the file system/file cabinet/library classification was that you had some sort of hierarchy in which the physical object was in one and only one location. And you had to locate it within its unique position in that hierarchy. Object store on AWS, say, sort of looks like that in that AWS essentially presents it as a filesystem structure by default but that's mostly hiding the actual structure.
bdcravens 3y ago
Perhaps, but in many cases, that's become more and more of a detail that abstracted away. I feel like the breadth of knowledge, for better or worse, to implement an application today is so much greater that depth isn't as easily obtained. There's no shortage of 30-year pros flabbergasted by the amount of Javascript tooling being used, while the bootcamp grad can easily keep all that in their head but perhaps struggles with knowledge of DNS.
zokier 3y ago
> programs on computers save things in locations that you need to navigate to when trying to find it again It bears keeping in mind that the traditional folders and documents desktop model is in no way fundamental or universal; its just one mode of computing that was popular in the turn of the century and steeply waning these days. And its not just phones where the change is happening. Cloud services and other saas have had at least as much if not more influence here. And of course in enterprises people have been using all sorts of weird internal software, erps and crms etc, that might also not been very document oriented. And its not just modern time thing too, for more historical viewpoint you could look at mainframes (IBM big iron etc) which had all sorts of data store models, both from system and end-user viewpoints.

zabzonk 3y ago

i remember teaching people about hierarchical file systems in the early 1990s - so no not much has changed.

jhbadger 3y ago
True, but there was a good 20 year period or so when even non-technical people were familiar with it from using their own computers.
bogwog 3y ago
Well, not knowing about this in the 90s was reasonable. Not knowing about it today is a failure somewhere in our education system/society/whatever.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I argue it's a failure to continue teaching something that humans do not and will not understand, and arguably also do not want in the first place. Computers for most people are just another household appliance or tool of their trade. They use computers to achieve certain tasks and they don't have time nor interest to figure out the details of how. They want the results, not the process. Abstraction of the file system is a step in the right direction, even if it rustles the jimmies of nerds and beards everywhere.
  - guender 3y ago
    [dead]
- bdcravens 3y ago
  Stacks have grown easier, but larger. The size of the labor pool is larger, and there are more abstractions. There was a time when programmers were all physicists, but I think it'd be silly to measure the talent of developers from the 90s by that standard. Ditto for measuring full stack developers by standard from a time when you needed nothing more than C and shell access to a cgi-bin folder.

a_gnostic 3y ago

Tell them you need a main enterance to access a building: Wide doors, fire safety regs. Next you need wide hallways, leading to atriums, with smaller doors, leading to apartments, individual rooms, cupboards, shelving, etc. A building is hierarchical, and similar to a file system. You can explain flow of people, flow of stuff, storage, whatever.

ghaff 3y ago

And honestly the file cabinet metaphor probably doesn't go over very well either because that doesn't mostly apply today either.

bdcravens 3y ago
Good point. For instance, object storage at first glance looks like the file cabinet, but that abstraction isn't entirely correct.
- ghaff 3y ago
  The historical situation was that the file system/file cabinet/library classification was that you had some sort of hierarchy in which the physical object was in one and only one location. And you had to locate it within its unique position in that hierarchy. Object store on AWS, say, sort of looks like that in that AWS essentially presents it as a filesystem structure by default but that's mostly hiding the actual structure.

bdcravens 3y ago

Perhaps, but in many cases, that's become more and more of a detail that abstracted away. I feel like the breadth of knowledge, for better or worse, to implement an application today is so much greater that depth isn't as easily obtained. There's no shortage of 30-year pros flabbergasted by the amount of Javascript tooling being used, while the bootcamp grad can easily keep all that in their head but perhaps struggles with knowledge of DNS.

zokier 3y ago

> programs on computers save things in locations that you need to navigate to when trying to find it again It bears keeping in mind that the traditional folders and documents desktop model is in no way fundamental or universal; its just one mode of computing that was popular in the turn of the century and steeply waning these days. And its not just phones where the change is happening. Cloud services and other saas have had at least as much if not more influence here. And of course in enterprises people have been using all sorts of weird internal software, erps and crms etc, that might also not been very document oriented. And its not just modern time thing too, for more historical viewpoint you could look at mainframes (IBM big iron etc) which had all sorts of data store models, both from system and end-user viewpoints.