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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Technology
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I've heard of CS majors coming in these days not knowing what a filesystem is.
Relevant article from The Verge on this.
so they think that reformatting is wiping the drive clean instead of recreating ntfs/exfat metadata files
A decade or more of kids growing up with shitty toy computers instead of real computers will do that. Mobile OSes, in their ridiculous pursuit to dumb down the computing experience, have dumbed down the computer users.
There seems to be a sweet spot in age where you grew up with actual computer experience. Young enough to actually grow up with computers in your household and school but old enough for those computers to not be toy mobile crap.
I'm very glad mobile Linux phones exist now. Having a real computer in my pocket rather than some awful imitation of what a computer should be is refreshing. I always wanted a pocket computer as a kid, but then when it actually happened it felt nothing like a computer unless you hacked it.
The first PC my family had, and thus first computer I had extensive experience with, was a Dell Pentium 4 running XP. Yeah, obviously I used a file system implicitly, but I remember thinking later when I entered college and the workforce that I was deprived of learning how to use a "real" computer because I didn't get to experience the consumer PCs of the 80s. I didn't have experience with a C64, I didn't need to learn BASIC or a command line just to use the computer. As a user, understanding how reads and writes to disk happened, and how to make the best use of my working memory wasn't necessary, the OS handled it all. I just needed to know to click "eject" first. And yet I'm doing fine (I think :D).
My point is, every generation will be able to say "I grew up with a dumbed down computing experience". But I'm more optimistic about this I think. I welcome a generation of computer scientists who think completely differently about how files should be organized. It's not important that I know BASIC, and maybe it's not important that today's students think in terms of file systems. They're still smart people, they'll still need to learn trees and graphs to solve problems. They just won't be pre-programmed with assumptions and requirements that may not exist anymore or in future hardware.