Students don’t know what files and folders are, professors say

Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up maintaining an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, thanks to powerful search functions now being the default in operating systems, as well as the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud storage, high school graduates don't see their hard drives the same way.

As anyone who has had to sift through a relative's landfill organization technique can attest, most people shouldn't be in charge of organizing their files. The machine should sort files based on metadata about the file, and people can select options and provide search criteria to filter the data. We're power users here, but even I rely on fd, locate, and ripgrep quite often.

I guess this most surprising part is this is surprising. Computing is application focused. People open MS Office Word, Apple Pages, or LibreOffice Writer; they don't open a file. Operating systems don't have pluggable extensions which let people manipulate various file types; they have applications which run on them.

On top of that, files and folders are a meta-construct so humans can grok filesystem semantics and, ultimately, blocks on a storage device.