Simon via Dng said on Fri, 17 Oct 2025 10:32:04 +0100

>Steve Litt <slitt@???> wrote:
>
>> I've been scratching my head asking "why doesn't Peter want to use
>> the ultra-convenient directory hierarchy bestowed by Linux?" Then I
>> remembered you're really an Oberon guy, and Neither ETH Oberon nor
>> Project Oberon has directories, just lots and lots of files, so you
>> probably want to think that way. Once upon a time I had CPM, which
>> also had no directory hierarchy.
>
>Now you’ve dragged me off down memory lane ...
>The very early Mac OS didn’t have directories either. Finder had
>folders, but that was just a display thing for the user.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_File_System
>
>Seems strange, but as the article says, when floppy disks only had
>400kbyte of storage, it was a different world.

A very different world. My 1984 Kaypro 2x CPM floppies had only 170K.
Even then I missed the directories I had with MS-DOS. You could read
a floppy's file list without going crazy, but hierarchy makes things
better for a human. And I sort of did have a hierarchy: Turbo Pascal on
one floppy, the OS on another floppy, my writings on yet another, etc.
In that world, such a thing was workable.

My physical office is a hierarchy. It contains bookshelves, a tool
chest, a computer, and a file cabinet. The bookshelves are lettered A
through F, with the shelves numbered from 1 (on top) all the way down.
The toolchest has many drawers, including a screwdriver drawer, a
wrench drawer, a bicycle tool drawer, a tiny drawer for tiny
screwdrivers, etc. How the heck would I ever find anything if all this
stuff were just scattered about? I'm not nearly as neat and organized
as this paragraph implies, so many things require an hour of searching
to find.

Bottom line: I think any filesystem should support hierarchies, because
that's how humans organize. Sure, I could write my own system to put
20,000 files in some sort of hierarchy, but I'd need to write code for
that system in every language I use. What a luxury it is to have the OS
give me the hierarchy I need.

I asked ChatGPT why a guy as smart as Niklaus Wirth would leave out
subdirectories. ChatGPT replied that Oberon was created as an
educational OS, with less than 10K lines of code, so a mere student
could understand it. Adding subdirectories would have added thousands of
lines of code and quite a bit of complexity, so he left it out. This
makes perfect sense.

It's kind of like Wirth's Pascal. It was great for school, but came up
short in the workplace. It took Philippe Kahn to make a few changes,
slaughtering some sacred cows of Pascal orthodoxy, to make a highly
practical language for the workplace. Back in the mid to late 1980's, I
could do anything with Turbo Pascal that I could with C: It ran just as
fast, and tended to have fewer weird errors.

Also sort of like an educational OS called Minix. It took some
teeny-bopper from Finland to slaughter a few sacred cows like
microkernels to turn it into something for the workplace.

Niklaus Wirth had a profound effect on my life. From my days as a
consumer audio repair tech, I already valued simplicity, thin
interfaces and modularity. Niklaus Wirth's Pascal reinforced these
beliefs, brought me into the software world, and became the basis for
my first development job.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com