As frustrating as I imagine it is to be in the position of having to figure out how to teach students things that seem like basics they should be aware of, I'd also argue that this issue actually stems from two circumstances that are worth this cost: the filesystem abstraction is increasingly unnecessary for non-technical people, and incoming students who want to study computer science aren't required to already have technical knowledge beyond that of their non-CS peers. The alternatives to where we're currently at would be either regressing the usability of interfaces for the overwhelming majority of people or taking away access to computer science education to people who didn't or couldn't go out of their way to learn topics that only matter to technical people in advance.
The growing irrelevance of the filesystem for the average computer user isn't a ln "epidemic" any more than the obsolescence of the CLI for the average person; it's just additional progress towards adapting computers to be more human-friendly rather than the reverse. We didn't used to have cars with automatic transmissions, cruise control, or blinkers that turned off on their own once you've finished turning, and no one describes the evolution evolution of the way we drove cars from decades ago to the present in the same language as a public health emergency.
Over time, technology becoming simpler to use by parts of the interface getting pushed down into implementation details is a good thing for the vast majority of people in the long run, and it's important for those of us who are technical not to mistake the requirement of a certain feature for the ability to access it. I think the biggest concern with the dominance mobile computing isn't that users might not need to know about the filesystem but that users might not have control of their own devices in the long run if the ability to access the filesystem is removed. There's precedent in getting support from the non-technical public to care about technical details when they understand how it affects them (e.g. right to repair, the pushback against SOPA/PIPA, net neutrality), but I that we'll miss the window to influence things similarly here if we focus on the wrong thing.
The growing irrelevance of the filesystem for the average computer user isn't a ln "epidemic" any more than the obsolescence of the CLI for the average person; it's just additional progress towards adapting computers to be more human-friendly rather than the reverse. We didn't used to have cars with automatic transmissions, cruise control, or blinkers that turned off on their own once you've finished turning, and no one describes the evolution evolution of the way we drove cars from decades ago to the present in the same language as a public health emergency.
Over time, technology becoming simpler to use by parts of the interface getting pushed down into implementation details is a good thing for the vast majority of people in the long run, and it's important for those of us who are technical not to mistake the requirement of a certain feature for the ability to access it. I think the biggest concern with the dominance mobile computing isn't that users might not need to know about the filesystem but that users might not have control of their own devices in the long run if the ability to access the filesystem is removed. There's precedent in getting support from the non-technical public to care about technical details when they understand how it affects them (e.g. right to repair, the pushback against SOPA/PIPA, net neutrality), but I that we'll miss the window to influence things similarly here if we focus on the wrong thing.