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People have been saying this for years. I remember in 2003, when people whined about how the nascent Mac OS X (as it was called at the time) still had a concept
by Millennium 13y ago
People have been saying this for years. I remember in 2003, when people whined about how the nascent Mac OS X (as it was called at the time) still had a concept of folders and files that needed to be in specific places. They wanted to "keep everything in a database" instead, like BeOS (never mind that BeOS also had files and folders in specific places; that was beside the point).
Ten years later, the filesystem hierarchy is still around. Nowadays, with the Internet's hierarchical domains and URI paths, I don't think there's any risk of it going anywhere. That notion of files in a space hangs around because, simply put, it works. People know what files and folders are, and hardlinks notwithstanding, they generally behave the way people expect them to. It's too easily-understood to throw away, not matter how hard people try.
- sliverstorm 13y agoThe file system is just, IMO, too fundamental to replace. It isn't that we haven't thought of alternatives- it is that there aren't any! Or, well, there is one- a flat database, which is just a flat filesystem- but as soon as you start using it, you will start wishing for some organization... In summary: If you give a mouse a cookie...
- foobarbazqux 13y agoThe problem is that digital file systems are digital versions of the physical file systems that we are all familiar with. Most notably these don't let one file be in two folders at the same time. But our mental file system does work like this. By this I mean that the same memory can be reached by multiple routes. Couldn't you design a filesystem that was a flat database with file metadata being used to both browse and search for files, thus avoiding the need for tree hierarchies in current systems? Wouldn't this be closer to our mental model? Crucially, could you develop software like this?
- krichman 13y agoBut you can (on Unix) put the same file in two places using ln[1]. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ln_(Unix)
- foobarbazqux 13y agoYou're right, and good point, I didn't think about hardlinks or symlinks. I guess you could do what I was suggesting by having one directory that contains every file and then creating links to them in different folders.
- Millennium 13y agoThat's what a lot of filesystems do behind the scenes, especially Unix-style ones.
- prostoalex 13y agoThat abstraction was highly dependent on physical storage unit attached to your device of choice. When most of storage is moved to the cloud and the books are stored in my Dropbox, private photos on my Flickr and public photos on my Instagram, it no longer matters that the underlying abstraction is using files and folders - they could switch to streams (case in point - iOS), and most users wouldn't care.
- raylu 13y agoWhile I agree with your point, I think you chose a poor example. In the last 10 years, URIs have changed to no longer refer to a path on the filesystem (yes yes, there are still a ton of old sites that do). A lot of new web frameworks start by regexing the daylights out of your URI and then running a function based on the match.
- Millennium 13y agoWhat you say is true as far as it goes, but only from the behind-the-scenes perspective of a programmer. From a user's perspective, not only does using these services feel like a filesystem, but according to current best practices, that's explicitly what's supposed to happen. The filesystem itself has become an important interface paradigm, and that's going to keep it alive.