I expected this to be an eye-rolling article, and it was at first, but it correctly identified the cause and implications, I think. It's not that a directory structure is intuitive or naturally, but simply that it was the interface that was taught by the tools used at the time, and isn't by mobile devices.
What makes directory structures interesting is that they are essentially recursive (a directory is a collection of files and other directories), and to understand them is to understand a recursive structure (a linked list being another such example) — I would guess this is where the barrier is.
This is a noteworthy phenomenon, though I wouldn't worry too much. It's just that a formerly grade-school level skill is now a college level skill. If you're in STEM, you're probably also going through the arduous task of learning LaTeX at the same time. If eight year olds typeset their book reports, you could imagine an professor equally incredulous that their students didn't know it.
One interesting takeaway comes from the invocation of search. There are filesystems (none in production use that I know of) that identify files as an unordered collection of (searchable) tags rather than a path: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3263550. There are a lot of interesting implications that come from this, such as tag-based ACLs, or transparent version control, but it's pretty underesearched.
I expected this to be an eye-rolling article, and it was at first, but it correctly identified the cause and implications, I think. It's not that a directory structure is intuitive or naturally, but simply that it was the interface that was taught by the tools used at the time, and isn't by mobile devices.
What makes directory structures interesting is that they are essentially recursive (a directory is a collection of files and other directories), and to understand them is to understand a recursive structure (a linked list being another such example) — I would guess this is where the barrier is.
This is a noteworthy phenomenon, though I wouldn't worry too much. It's just that a formerly grade-school level skill is now a college level skill. If you're in STEM, you're probably also going through the arduous task of learning LaTeX at the same time. If eight year olds typeset their book reports, you could imagine an professor equally incredulous that their students didn't know it.
One interesting takeaway comes from the invocation of search. There are filesystems (none in production use that I know of) that identify files as an unordered collection of (searchable) tags rather than a path: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3263550. There are a lot of interesting implications that come from this, such as tag-based ACLs, or transparent version control, but it's pretty underesearched.