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we invented writing to do administration. to record contracts, land titles, wills. and then we used the same materials to write down stories and poems, to do calligraphy, to write love letters and notate music. the metaphor doesnt hold us back.
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@zens@merveilles.town/112805443314729008
yeah, i am very sceptical of "the files & folders metaphor is bad, folks" takes.
why? because i have lived through _decades_ of software developers having that same thought and making software harder to understand and harder to use because of it.
from Windows 95's ridiculous "just put everything into My Documents"
to iOS's "well, now everything you make is locked away inside this app"
to Dropbox and iCloud's "oh we decided you didnt need that thing and deleted it from your local storage"
yes, the filesystem is stodgy and boring and has a billion shortcomings.
but it is a really solid substrate for building things on. its user-level metaphor is shallow and pretty transparent.
and proponents of replacing it always seem to end up thinking more about the features they imagine having, and less about the stodgy and boring reality of substrates.
show me that you understand that you are building new _foundations_ and i will be right there with you.
@vfig Moving offtopic:
The Apple Newton had this thing called the "soup". I'd like to see someone write an overview of what that was and how it worked for an audience of modern programmers.
@mcc huh. never heard of that feature of it before. thanks.
the second reference on the wikipedia page about it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_(Apple)
—which oddly does not seem to be linked from the apple newton page) looks like a decent overview (for my learning at any rate):
http://www.canicula.com/newton/prog/soups.htm