Long Filenames Are Evil
I’ve been a File Naming Convention Evangelist for years now, and no one seems to listen. I go on and on about things like “8 characters or less” and “no spaces in filenames,” and people placate me, sure, and then they go right ahead and give their Word documents names like “blah blah blah blah — FINAL VERSION — USE ME — THIS REALLY IS THE LAST VERSION.doc.” Forget about the fact that this approach makes it more difficult to automate things that require file name pointers because you might have to add extra code like escape sequences or any of that obscure programming talk… This points to a complete inability to make the metaphorical connection between computer files and paper files (and folders). At least one person seems to agree with me on this. My obsession stems from my days of word processing, back in the early ’90’s, the good old days when filenames really had to be 8 characters or less, believe it or not, and people had to find all sorts of creative ways to manage their documents. Thanks to the ever-decreasing cost of storage, we now have access to more information than ever before. Thanks to the long filename, people have a nifty way of making the right information impossible to find. Having built myself a document management system of sorts to deal with my own work while advocating the implementation of a commercial product for the enterprise, it occurred to me that it might be beneficial, even advisable, to effectively hide the filesystem from everyone (except for system administrators). Ask the average Windows user (and possibly Mac user, but I’ll leave that crowd alone) what Windows Explorer is and you’ll see that the filesystem is already more or less hidden. Finding Windows Explorer has become more difficult with each Windows release. Document management is the logical next step, and rumor has it that the next release of Windows will have something like it, not to mention the proliferation of desktop search engines of late. So here’s my cynical self chiming in, wondering where this will all lead. Rather than hiring competent people in the first place, let’s hire morons, then write software that will enable them to look like they’re actually doing some job, ANY job. I think I just stumbled upon my startup. I’ll call it “Software for Idiots.” Wait- I think something like that’s been done already. No, that was for Dummies.
Just a preemptive shout-out to my Linux friends, who would maintain that “Software for Idiots” is synonymous with Microsoft.