[spacephysics]

I agree in a perfect world, but I believe the OS should have a design that “forces” the programmer to maintain the correct abstraction.

Or at least have the override for such abstractions be blatant and explicit if the programmer wants to circumvent them.

And of course, given the age of Windows OS/ecosystem, it’s a pipe dream to have a redesign that isn’t backwards compatible

[zelon88]

How do you tell the program what belongs where? How does the OS know that the application is reading a file full of configuration entries that should be in the registry? What is the difference between reading a file full of data and reading a file containing your own configuration?

How does the OS know that the file you're writing to belongs in AppData or not?

To create the system calls for this you would break everything about windows file permissions. Currently, you interact as a user account. In order to accomplish the real time heuristics you're proposing you would also need an application user account in addition to the users user account.

At what point does the responsibility for knowing how to code fall on the programmer? How much capability are you willing to take away from effective programmers, to artificially protect the ineffective ones from themselves?