Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.

But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It’s not taught at school. It’s not relevant to anything they do.

It used to make me so frustrated (it’s a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it’s not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators). It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.