Regarding the floppy disk icon, the post says: "That’s holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no

Regarding the floppy disk icon, the post says: "That’s holding onto the past; and providing a lack of recognition for young people, who will literally have no idea what one is." I don't see what's the problem with "holding onto the past": everyone knows there was a past, that the world didn't start when they were born. One way or another, we get to know about things that existed (and disappeared) before we were born, and we accept it as something natural. Going by the line of thought the author suggests, we may as well, for example, ditch files and folders - not just the icons, but the complete organizational concept. I guess we could just use "libraries" and "galleries", but look at where those are going... in some years, using these concepts could as well mean "holding onto the past". "Imagine a native digital medium" In my humble opinion, "digital" and "native" don't combine very well. "Digital" is far from being something every human is familiar with, at birth (so that it can be considered "native"). Killing the icon is actually going to have a negative effect on the creation of a "native digital medium", because icons are many times representations of real life, even if poor representations. For the medium to be native, it would need to actually be closer to what we see in real life, than to be even more abstract. And let's not forget the fact that after knowing their meaning (regardless of them having any meaning in the physical environment around us), icons are an easy and quick way of recognizing certain functionality even on never-before-seen UI screens, which gives a better first time experience of any software.