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by hmmyeah
5082 days ago
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> "Non-geeks don't have the time, interest or inclination to catalogue and curate these sorts of structures." Define non-geek then. Unless you mean "people who have too few items to need organization", I think that's wrong. I've met plenty of not super bright people who had for example a perfectly organized garage or apartment. I dare say it has nothing to do with geekyness. There's even tidy kids.. they cannot even program a computer, they cannot reach the cookie jar like I can, but they can and do organize the stuff they care about, in ways they care about. > "The list that the author gives of everyday items that are easy to use ("cupboards, Tupperware, boxes, closets, pockets, wallets") all have the common property that they are not recursive" What? You can put tupperware into a box, and put that into the cupboard. Usually, this is located in a house which is located in a street, which is in a city. And so on. The levels of nesting, nobody counted them.. but most everybody navigates them just fine. |
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I was using 'geeks' in the sense of someone who is interested in computers in their own right, as opposed to the vast majority of people who use computers as a tool to accomplish other things.
I don't mean "people who have too few items to need organization", and I certainly didn't characterize them as "not super bright"; you made that assumption.
> you can put tupperware into a box, and put that into the cupboard... house ... street .. city
Yes, but you cannot fit a cupboard into a tupperware box, with the cupboard containing another 50 tupperware boxes. Your analogy ignores the important difference between real and virtual items, namely that real containers have physicality which makes it trivial to figure out at least an upper bound on what they contain.
Additionally, an opaque cupboard has context which gives it clues as to what it might contain (clothes in a bedroom, plates in the kitchen). A drawer has a volume which means that you don't need to go looking for a beach ball in it. There are tonnes of conventions as to what types of items go in what containers. For a file system, all we've got is a name on an opaque 'box' that might contain N other boxes recursing to M levels.
You need to create the file structure in the first place, spend a lot of time revisiting, organizing and curating it for it to be as familiar to you as the storage in your house. I don't mean to offend anyone if I say that only geeks have the time to do this.