TheEndOfDocumentsAndNames

Getting into a twitter debate about this.

I think there are two sorts of intuitions going on here.

One, I believe, is just about pictures. People who work with a lot of images and who think that computers are about producing images tend to think "I can just visually scroll through a list of thumbnails to find the image I want. Who needs files-systems and names?"

And maybe that works for them. I don't work with a lot of pictures so this doesn't have much pull for me. But yeah, for picture oriented people working with a lot of images, fine, let's have a specialist picture oriented UI. But that's only a subset of what we use computers for. (Also, I note that many of my friends who've taken to using Instagram as their basic lifestream picture file-system, spend an inordinate of time scrolling through a long list of pictures every time they want to find something.)

The second is I suspect a matter of "aesthetics". People see something like myproject/draft6.txt and they think "how ugly! It's neither a good name. Nor does it have the purity of a UUID. It's a horrible kludgy in-between kind of thing"

Now I love kludgy in-between kind of things. I think they are the best way to capture the awkward messy nature of the real world. In this case, myproject/draft6.txt well represents the degree to which I couldn't be arsed to think of a better name, but was still able to kludge in a bit of cheap but useful meta-data in that it's the 6th in the order of the drafts I made. It's in a folder called myproject which also sets the context.

Now you might well say "ah, but the OS could handle that meta-data in a so much more principled, systematic way" And it could. But at a cost. If I didn't add the draft number and relied on the OS giving me dates automatically, then I'd need to set up my machine for that. Perhaps I configure my list of files to always show the last modified data column. Something I don't need to see 90% of the time, but do here. Or I type special queries like ls -la instead of ls. Etc.

But of course, names are free-form fields too, so I can add less predictable meta-data to them. Such as myproject/draft8-after-janes-review.txt Of course we could try to build the features of advanced work-flow systems directly into our OS, but no OS can possibly pre-support ALL the possible use-cases that human-writable free-form labels can describe. Names are incredibly powerful and flexible.