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Let me paint a picture for you: It's about 15 degrees outside and you get into your freezing car to go to work. You give the car a little gas as you turn the key and it turns over but doesn't quite start. Unfazed, you give it another try, and you're closer, but no cigar. On your third try, you pay attention to how much gas you're giving it and, feathering the pedal just the right way, the car fires up. You sit in your driveway and rev the engine for a few minutes to get it warmed up. When you put it in gear, however, the engine stalls. You aren't surprised, but fuck, you thought you let it run long enough so that wouldn't happen. So you start it again and let it run a little longer, revving the engine occasionally, but it still stalls as you put it in gear. You're mildly concerned at this point but not to the point you'd call a tow truck or anything. You fire it up a third time (or a fourth, depending on how lucky you're feeling), before you decide to investigate the problem. You go outside and freeze your ungloved fingers off getting the hood open and sure enough, it's just as you suspected; the so-called "automatic" choke isn't opening properly. You stick your fingers into a running engine to open it up manually, get back into the car, and, if you're lucky, you'll be able to drive away. But you may have to repeat the process a couple times depending on how cold it is.
I used to drive a car from the 70s, and this sort of thing used to be the reality of owning an automobile. People like to bitch these days about how "you can't work on cars anymore!" and I agree, that car was super-easy to work on. And that was a good thing, because you'd be working on it a lot. I'm not talking about major repairs here, either. I'm talking about annual plug changes, annual point changes, setting the spark with a timing light, lube jobs, semiannual coolant changes, reformatting the carb for high-altitudes, and a bunch of other shit that nobody does anymore. It's still better than it was in my grandfather's day, when people would patch tires, carry spark plugs in the car for emergency changes, and cars would regularly overheat, even if there wasn't anything wrong with them. When was the last time your car was vapor locked?
I imagine that you've never experienced any of this before. These days, all cars have multiport fuel injection and electronic ignition and not starting and overheating aren't par for the course but signs of a serious problem. People aren't as knowledgeable about cars as they used to be, but people don't really have to be knowledgeable anymore. Computers had their own switch from carburetion to fuel injection, the switch from DOS to NT architecture. Just as most cars now run when you turn the key, most programs will run after a simple installation process, and run properly. But I can't fault today's kids for not understanding file structures any more than I can fault anyone born after 1989 for not knowing how autoexec.bat or config.sys works, or not knowing how to gap plugs. They might not know how to do things you think are basic, but it's not a problem unless they need to know, and if they never do need to know than the world is better off for it.
The problem is that this lack of knowledge is showing up even in kids pursuing careers in computer-related fields:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/gen-z-kids-file-systems
And this is a problem how, exactly? If actual computer scientists didn't know this I'd be concerned, but as much as we'd like to think that a certain base-level of knowledge is required to study something seriously, it really isn't. Those of us who grew up with file structures as an essential part of computing just assumed that they always would be, and are now shocked to find that technology has rendered them unnecessary for a lot of people. If indeed knowledge of them is necessary, then you're going to have to teach them about it.
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For the general population, I am with @Rov_Scam here: who cares? In the future kids will probably just store their stuff in some Microsoft cloud and ask some LLM to get them whatever they need (unless it was flagged for copyright violation in the meantime).
On the other hand, not having a concept of a file system will severely limit what you could have done with a computer so far. How do you run your hello world Python script without passing the file name to your interpreter? I mean, there are probably cloud based solutions a la Overleaf which will just run your code in a browser, but being at the mercy of some SaaS platform seems like a sad existence for any programmer indeed.
I care, because my mobile OS is built with people who don't know how a filesystem works in mind, and is therefore trying to obfuscate from me the difference between a local folder with pictures and an album I uploaded to Picasa in 2010. The images from old scouting trips are pushed to the front, and the folders I want are hidden behind multiple screen transitions. I probably wiped some photos from 2023 because of a dialog asking me if I want to "fix" a problem with the memory card, conveniently omitting that said fix involves formatting it. A system for adults would tell me what is actually happening, but hey, no difference between cloud a local so who cares, right?
And that's not even getting into the weeds of a cloud provider running an analysis on every photo and piece of text uploaded, so that the social wrongthink score can be calculated.
I completely agree, the general theorem is "build a system that any idiot can use, and only idiots will want to use it."
Relatedly, I believe that command line interfaces are often superior to GUIs in practice because 'users willing to use a CLI' already selects for 'users willing to ignore a certain level of detail provided by the system, unless they have a good reason to care about it'. This allows the devs to provide an adequate level of detail. fsck can confidently mention inodes trusting that users who do not know about them do not will not halt and catch fire upon encountering an unknown term.
For android, the thing which makes the use bearable to me is to lie to the device and claim that I am an android developer. Voila, shell access via adb, no-hassle file transfer from the command line, etc pp. Together with picking a phone whose manufacturer supports OEM unlocks and a custom FW with root access, it almost feels like I actually own my device.
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That's a bit of a motte-and-bailey, though, isn't it? He said "files and folders"; you say "autoexec.bat or config.sys". Even in a perfectly working system there's value to be had in being able to sort your own data (independently of application) and in being able to look through others' sorted data. You're talking about people who can't change spark plugs and he's worrying about people who can't steer. (although that metaphor works both ways, in the world of "car, drive me to my brother's house" and "computer, show all the meme images I edited that have a cat in them")
I don't know exactly how things are managed on an iPad, but my point is that if some kind of software renders files structures as we know them obsolete, there's no point in complaining about people not knowing how to use them. Not knowing how to steer a car isn't much of an issue if all cars are autonomous, similar to how automatic transmissions have rendered stick shifts obsolete for most people in the United States.
what do you do when the automatic system suffers an error and wants to drive off a cliff?
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