As the great Joe Armstrong used to say, “a lot of systems actually break the laws of physics”[1] — don’t program against the laws of physics.
> In distributed systems there is no real shared state (imagine one machine in the USA another in Sweden) where is the shared state? In the middle of the Atlantic? - shared state breaks laws of physics. State changes are propagated at the speed of light - we always know how things were at a remote site not how they are now. What we know is what they last told us. If you make a software abstraction that ignores this fact you’ll be in trouble.[2]
It’s astonishing to me that even so many long-term Apple observers don’t see this, even though they are sorta obvious about it. “Now that the hardware is so close, the systems converge, etc., there is really no reason iPad will not eventually run macOS” – No, macOS will continue to be dumbed and locked down (“security!!11”) until the point where the Macs can be safely switched over from the terribly open legacy OS.
> I always feel like I'm having to decode it. But I can easily and happily work with some programming languages that most devs would cross the street to avoid.
Those languages happen to be "imperative"? – the few backend devs I know who at least sort of vibe with CSS are all used to declarative programming. I think that might be at least one of the reasons?
> You would create and manage content directly from the file explorer application, in the most natural way possible.
This version of the web wouldn’t require users to learn advanced computer skills in order to participate.
My students at university (Gen Z) have no concept of the “file system”.
That's not even a generational thing. People have been (e.g.) saving everything to the desktop for as long as there have been desktops. "Managing files" has always been a subsidiary task to the things people wanted to use computers for.
Inline, ordered multimedia is the backbone of all consumer information systems. So your students have internalized the the archetypal equivalent of file systems through a different vocabulary, such as tweet (for files) and threads (for directories)
A lot of folks in that demographic are what you might call “cloud natives”. Their hard drives are used for storing the software that connects them to Google Drive or OneDrive or what have you.
We grew up in a time when understanding file systems in terms of “a system for organizing your files” was not optional. Gen Z has grown up in a time when their data was a Google Drive search away from their fingers.
