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Originally Posted by Ensign Steve
Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea
I mean, I sort of get how the desktop metaphor is weird. It always has been. It's never really made sense entirely, and while it can feel intuitive to people who are used to it, it really isn't at all.
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Dude, that article. I can't even. Maybe I am being extremely uncharitable, but it reads to me like grown up people think there's an actual nano-scale filing cabinet in their computer's memory, and kids these days don't understand that that's how computers work. Back in our day, we had to physically open the tiny file drawers with our little tweezers, and insert the ones and zeros in it by hand.
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It's not uncharitable. It's understandable, though. It's hard to conceptualize it differently once you're used to it. People sometimes call the desktop metaphor intuitive, but they just mean familiar.
Like, there are a lot of people who can't wrap their heads around the idea that when the same information is used in multiple places or contexts, like in a system or navigation diagram, it's not physically copied into a bunch of different places. But if that's not their primary field, it doesn't matter much how they conceptualize things, as long as it works for them. And they don't fight you when you tell them it's not like that.
All the more reason not to leave remedial computer skills to random math and science professors.
But regardless of the metaphor or organization technique you use, you do need one, and if it's for anything but your own immediate use, it needs to be clear and consistent. Whether it's a filing cabinet or a tagging system or whatever.