But, but the code I write is self-documenting. /s
I propose a ‘Comments considered harmful’ as later maintainers may not update the comments as the code is changed.
Could everyone just start using Donald Kunth’s literate programming model.
And a damned fine rant it was.
I started around the same time; learned BASIC on HP125 running CP\M, and COBOL on an HP3000 running MPE II (maybe III, it’s been a while).
I think because the tree structure was one of the first things to come out of graphics on computers and we’ve lived with them all this time gives us a bit of an edge. 
Even then though, I knew people who struggled with it and I just put it up to being uncomfortable with new technology. But it’s also that some, maybe most, people just aren’t wired that way.
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I simply don’t get how it is so hard to understand, though. It’s just filing cabinets, the only difference to the real world being that you can put a filing cabinet inside a filing cabinet.
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Did you not hear the horror stories about filing cabinets in the olden days? From what I understand nobody knew how to file properly.
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I remember it well, going into the library to open a book and find inside that book more books and even shelves of books to peruse. And it kept going like that like Russian nesting dolls.
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I got better at it when I started doing it for future me. Coming back a year or two later I have no idea what the heck they thought they were doing.
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I was taught that the purpose of a filing system is not the orderly putting away of things, but the easy retrieval of things. That mindset makes a big difference.
And may have helped past @pfranz - I guess past you did not document their thinking for future you. 
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Google Docs seems to be trying, intentionally or not, to train us out of the folder-tree as a concept. Everything’s just “recently” or “search.” Google Drive will begrudge you a folder tree if you insist, but it does so with so much interaction overhead it trains me to attempt to remember the title of everything, then search for it. This works… poorly.
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Outlook shoved you this way by making old shared folders fragile or not even tenable, then jamming in a new way to search every couple years. The latest search iteration is downright borken - it’ll skip right by relevant results in specified subfolders and say, “Outlook found no results but here’s [dozens of irrelevant results from all the other ass-ends of Outlook]”. Now I’m literally eyeball-searching for emails. 
And YES to all of the above gripes.
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Related, this article I just read about (in part) how the new interfaces make the system more about easily retrieving the things their corporate creators want us to find.
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Thanks for that, but reading it made me somewhat depressed.
The author makes a fundamental error right at the outset. How anyone can possibly call a list on Spotify a ‘music collection’ is beyond me.
Later, he says:
our cultural collections are not wholly our own any more.
(They never were.)
and
It’s very difficult to be responsible for what we collect on the internet;
(It wasn’t ‘collected’ if it stayed on the internet.)
and
I’ll keep subscribing to Spotify because it’s the only way I’ll have access to the music.
Really? The only way? I have zero sympathy for this.*
Nothing is ‘collected’ on the internet. It is merely temporarily assembled and if it is assembled for free you have no right to expect it will remain assembled tomorrow. Even if you pay for it, they can change your access in a heartbeat.
If it is digital only (no physical copy) pay the right price for it and download it and store it locally. Spotify pays less than peanuts to artists. If you want it enough to want it in your ‘collection’, buy a physical copy or download a paid copy from the artist directly.
I rather think he is confusing his ‘listening history’ with a ‘collection’.**
You are correct that the new interfaces provided by our digital overlords are designed to make things easy to retrieve - but this is only on a temporary basis, and the author is right that they can change the ease of that retrieval in a heartbeat.
If you did not put it away yourself, somewhere you and only you have control over, you did not ‘file’ it. (Or ‘collect’ it.)
The exception to this is where there is a strongly enforced, widely agreed standard (e.g. Dewey Decimal in the public library, or the corporate data management standards of your employer or some other community enforced approach).
(*He makes it clear he is old enough to have had physical folders of many CDs. He ought to know better than to claim Spotify is the ‘only way’.)
(**I speak as someone with approaching 10,000 music tracks on my PC and maybe a third to a half of those exist in a physical form here, too. This is a ‘collection’.)
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You’re right on the underscore, come to think of it. I don’t actually know why we put date last (or second depending on the place) but by then periods where the thing. In that work anyway, the coders in the development department of one particular office FUCKING hated it. Though I guess it made more sense when it was time code, or a number from a shot list.
I think what everyone else who’s mentioning other standards is missing is why this becomes mostly gibberish outside of the context where I learned to do this.
When it comes to shit I have lying around, putting the date in there is often utterly useless except for things that have multiple revisions kept. Like my resume. And frankly the OS/Meta data already tags that shit with a date. And it would be much smarter to sort these things into file folders than to add a bunch of identifiers or abbreviations to whatever I name them out of habit.
So for @Doctor_Faustus’ purposes. It’s probably more useful to do something more specific than doc.txt, but a lot of people who look like they have better habits. Probably don’t. They just have habits.
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I want to go to that library! 
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This will probably increasingly be the case as technology continues to advance and splinter into ever more specific categories.
No one can know everything about everything (or probably everything about any one thing). There is simply too much information available to be grasped fully.
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For sure- this is an annoying aspect of the modern obfuscation of asset storage. You can no longer poke around and see how things work, find undocumented config files, etc. It’s rather like how modern cars cover the entire engine with plastic covers to make it appear tidy and atomic, but this keeps you from seeing what components are there.
A downside to hierarchies that nobody has mentioned yet- they require perfect maintenance. Every single file must be categorized and meticulously stored in the correct place or you will never find it again. This is why most people don’t succeed with them. Most people cannot stay organized to this degree. I can and do, and angry meticulous people say “it’s not that hard”, but most people really struggle with this. It’s why we have search at all, and it’s the key advantage of an all-search paradigm- zero maintenance. For most people, this is a big win. Not me, which is why I won’t stop using folders, but I see why other people like all-search.
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I’m not sure most people make the distinction between “tidy” and “organized.” I see a lot of people who clean up by shoving everything into a drawer so they end up with a clean desk.
On the other hand, I’ve spent more time organizing photos than searching for or retrieving them. I gave that up after awhile, but am very thankful I can search for “license plate” and get my car. I probably wouldn’t have added that tag, but the magic AI snooping through my phone did.
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Absolutely. I have a friend who studies this, and that effect was/is real. In the 1980s and 1990s, home computers were bought for boys, put in the boys’ rooms, and filled with games made by men for boys. Then we encouraged girls to go into computer science, and a whole generation of them dropped out by second year because they were so far behind the boys in the foundational basics (or felt they were). Growing up immersed in computing was a huge advantage for those boys and the transition to mobile computing has gone a long way to leveling this playing field.
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Another strike against search is that it doesn’t handle dyslexia at all. If I created a folder called Artickels I know I meant articles and can find anything I saved in there.
Good luck at remembering how you misspelled something six months ago when using a search app.
ETA:
At least the marketing departments made people believe that. A lot of women who made games were “encouraged” to have a pseudonym, and a lot of games with women or ungendered PCs were changed to have men PCs.
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I was sitting in a car-repair shop’s office waiting for my car, listening to the staff. One person was explaining to another how to get to a website. She had arrived at a folk explanation that you needed to google something in order to get a usable link—if you want to visit www.ford.com, you google that, and then click the link. These people were contemporaries of me, and I’m in my 50s. If you don’t have a systematic understanding of how this stuff works, your folk explanations are going to be weird, regardless of age.
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Yeah, it is not only young students who have no clue how things work and how they can be made more efficient.
I’m in my early 30s and the other two people in my office are in mid and late 30s, and every time i get amazed at how they still use the methods they learned to do things exactly as they were taught.
For example, when i have to discuss a problem with my boss that requires looking at a map or street view, he switches to the browser, go to google, type the address, then look for the maps result, instead of short-cutting some steps.
But, it still works for them and they don’t have an idea how to tinker with it or how much effort/time it would take to try an alternative.
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