We built this future. We built platforms that do not allow using the file system. We built this mobile-first, file system-last world. We're to blame.
My father was a programmer in his COBOL years, and heavily user of text editors and all sorts of terminal-based systems in his job. He never "got" Windows, or graphic interfaces in general. The metaphor just didn't land.
Filesystems are one example which points to a lack of understanding of how computers work on a lower level. If you can't understand how things work on a lower level you can't repair or innovate on a lower level. Eventually shit breaks down and we're back to bear knives and flint skins.
I would ask -what's so great about NOT knowing about file systems?
As an example of "how it actually works", when I had my first computer, I had to manually defrag disks all the time, otherwise they'd get screwed faster. Modern OSes eventually paved over that detail, so you don't have to know how to do that. That prevents you from repairing a fragged disk, or innovating at a lower level. And it doesn't really matter.
Okay. Defragging your disk prepares you to understand the concept of heap fragmentation later on in life. Understanding heap fragmentation and how to avoid it, how to compact segments, how to allocate smartly, allows you to write MUCH MUCH faster and higher quality software.
Today, there are a hundred thousand Zoomer developers spraying exabytes of poorly allocated objects all over the heaps of millions of production systems.
We frequently lament the fact that our standard Office applications run slower on 16 core, 4GHz machines than they did on a 66MHz 486DX, then we proceed to claim that the towers of abstractions we've built and the complete ignorance of the underlying hardware "doesn't really matter".
And if you think that developers below the age of 25 are the main reason your standard Office apps are slow, I wonder when you think that trend started and what the workforce building them looks like.
Same with everything else that's part of what's "understand how file systems work" means for users. It's an abstraction that tells you nothing about the underlying hardware - not to mention the underlying hardware having evolved quite a bit over the past few decades.
uhhh no. Absolutely did NOT help me, or any of the people I know (many of which never got into tech, so don't even understand what a programming language is, let alone "heaps") :-)
What happened to intellectual curiosity and wanting to learn for the sake of understanding how things work?
How is it being forced on you? Nobody forces you to use Apple products. Or Google services. Or FB/Insta. etc
And Android still has a visible file system.
IOS hides it a lot more. There wasn't even a file manager until they introduced one with iPadOS.