The real problem isn’t “how do we organize files better?” but rather “why are we organizing files at all?"
This dovetails with what college professors are observing with students that did not grow up with the traditional desktop metaphor with its hierarchal file based directory structure as their dominant GUI paradigm.
Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question… Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
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More broadly, directory structure connotes physical placement — the idea that a file stored on a computer is located somewhere on that computer, in a specific and discrete location. That’s a concept that’s always felt obvious to Garland but seems completely alien to her students. “I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it,” Garland says. “They see it like one bucket, and everything’s in the bucket.”
It seems like that mindset shift is happening in software development, especially with LSPs and LLMs offering developers new ways of writing and searching through code. In Elixir land, there are projects like LiveBook and Phoenix Playground - The easiest way to run single-file Phoenix apps that have been chipping away at the traditional one module per file convention.
